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I took a class this weekend with Lynda Barry called “Writing the Unthinkable”. In it we did lots of five-minute exercises designed to dredge up memories and excavate images. I’m going to try to keep doing these, and post the results every day. Sometimes I might draw pictures, too. Sometimes I might post the same [...]

1. She got her BA in nutrition because she loves science.2. She prefers clean-shaven men.3. She’s the one that gave my great-uncle Buzzy (nee Oskar) his nickname.4. Her dad favored her younger sister. “That took a while to get over.”5. She still wonders if she could have saved my grandfather’s life.

I’ve decided that I should myself as I would a wayward child: discipline, structure, and a generous application of dessert treats as rewards. Writing (for the fun of it, to remind myself it *is* fun) every day for at least a half an hour upon waking, enforced hygiene (brush your hair one hundred strokes and [...]

The man on the right is my grandfather. The man on the left is, I’m guessing, someone he trained with at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. On the back of the photo, in my grandpa’s messy handwriting, he’s identified as “Lt Krause.” My grandfather took a fair number of photos of his days in the army. [...]

The last few nights, I’ve been spooked at bedtime, reluctant to sleep in my darkened room. I’ve been leaving the bedside lamp on. It bothers me and makes it hard to fall asleep, but without it I start to imagine all sorts of things, like torsos, headless and legless, crawling up onto the bed, or [...]

My grandfather, beatnik phase My father, eccentric phase.

My grandparents (and my grandfather’s reflection) at their wedding. Grandma, my dad and I found this in an album last night, after Grandma’s birthday dinner. “You look so young!” I said. “How old were you?” “Twenty five?” said grandma. “That is young.” “Twenty four? Twenty three? Twenty two?” We all laughed. “Young!”

My grandmother and my aunt Carol, hiding behind the rhubarb leaves One thing I always do when visiting my grandparents is pore through all the family albums. It’s just a more elaborate kind of narcissism, I suppose, but I’ve always been somewhat soothed by looking at these sort of reflections out into the past. It [...]

I’m in Vancouver, visiting my grandmother, who’s in the hospital. It’s been making for strange, tiring days that I’m going to have to sit on for a bit before I try to write for public consumption. This is a piece about my grandma that I wrote for her birthday last year. I found it tonight [...]

Right now, they’re filming Milk, a movie about the life and death of Harvey Milk, on location here in San Francisco. Certain parts of three blocks of Castro street have been made over for the movie, with storefronts returned to their 1970s facades, and era-appropriate cars parked on either side of the street. It’s a [...]