I’m a lucky girl. That fact has occurred to me before, but it’s never popped into my mind at the same time that my blog has, at least not until now. Anyway, it’s the truth, I’m lucky.

I was born a healthy baby girl in 1985. I spent my first twenty-one years living in Phoenix, Arizona. My mother, father, and even my brother are relatively normal people. There’s never been any need of anger management in the family. There is no insanity. None have a criminal record. Not...

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So...I think all families have - by definition - a certain nebulous aspect: the outer limits are vague, and there are always mysterious step-aunts and proto-cousins a couple counties away, or in nominally familiar-sounding cities (Joliet? Las Cruces? Macon? Muncie?) in states unseen. They may or may not pop up at the occasional family reunion, or as some unannounced Thanksgiving surprise shrouded in sighs, whispers and the sort of ethereal intrigues delicately deflected from the ears of the...

I don't know the precise title of the poem, or the precise year in which it was written, but there's an old piece by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which opens with the following words: People getting divorced / driving around with their things in their car...


My first encounter with Mr. Ferlinghetti was highly unanticipated - in my lowly high school, located in a suburb of Charlotte, the library included a handful of examples of beat writing: a general anthology, and two of Ferlinghetti's...

(February 2010 draft)

So there's this great moment in the world of customer service: you're completing a transaction, and it's usually not an especially impressive one, when the guy in question - in a moment of grand, high theatre - snakes his arm around the credit card terminal, a fat shield of flesh manouvered to prevent your (that is to say, my) prying eyes from making the mental notation of his PIN number.

Dirty peon or not, I've been the victim of nefarious...