Under a Black Rainbow

  I truly recognized it today for the first time, this pattern of the last few months. Not that I didn't see it happening physically, only that I didn't see it for it what it was until now.  I've been angry about my writer's block and my reader's block. These are two things I used to take a great deal of enjoyment in doing. I've had to pivot my creative output into other avenues because my old stand-bys are on indefinite leave. Part of me hates this because it's the longest blockage I've had since I actively started focusing on my writing some 20+ years ago. The other part of me hates it because I can almost taste the potential stories on the tip of my mind's tongue. Frustratingly out of reach.  My music block is another one that's been really tough to grapple with these days. I've got some gigs coming up thankfully, which has lit a fire under my ass to really get back into it, but it's been an uphill battle.  You might be wondering where...

The Gold Persimmon 274 pages $16.00 Order Your Copy HERE To be aboveboard, I've known Lindsay for a long, long time. We met back when I lived in San Francisco. She's always been a fantastic writer, but this is her debut novel. While I haven't finished it yet, her first chapter is some of the best and most interesting world-building I've seen in a long time.  The prose is fluid and moves across the page at a fantastic pace. The narrative is captivating and the characters even more so. I love that the cover so perfectly exemplifies the dual nature of the storylines without giving much of anything away, but with the more detailed version of the hotel displayed upside down to the reader.  From the first moment your eyes scan the cover, you know this book is unlike any other you'll read this year. You know you're about to be thrown into a world you've never seen before and run into characters that may end up haunting your days long after.  *     *     * Pub...

The house is emptier this weekend. We got the basement storage area cleared out; closets fully emptied of holiday dinnerware and old luggage, bedroom sets deconstructed into their base parts with box springs and mattresses wrapped up in plastic. The digital piano picked up and given a home with friends. We're closer to emptying this place, closer to closing its doors to us forever.  The sun was out today, shining bright in between weird bouts of microbursts all weekend long. The high window in the foyer soaked up so much of that brightness it was hard not to get caught up in the angles of the moment, the lines of the hallway reaching up into the vaulted ceilings, framing the sunlit vision in a perfect moment.  The house felt vibrant, alive. I wonder how much anthropomorphism I'm projecting onto things right now with the majority of my days and evenings spent in so much solitude.  I feel like I could walk this house blind-folded all these years on, like I know the entirety...

I've done this before, said goodbye to a house I called home for a decade plus. It's definitely different this time around, however.  This is the home I lived in while figuring out who I would be for the rest of my life. This is the home that has felt the most like a home to me. It has felt the most stable - physically, emotionally, and abstractly. It's been a great central locale for not only my siblings and I, but for the rest of our extended family as well. A place of congregation and comfortable space during the holidays. It's a place full of memories I'm actually able to recall with perfect clarity.  Though I couldn't tell you what it looked like when we first moved in. I remember being angry that we left Oklahoma City for Kansas City, a place that was equally named (seemingly lazily) after its own state. I remember being bitter for the change of scenery, for being uprooted and forced to adapt to a new city full of new people. For being forced to start over...

I've always had a pretty widespread taste in music, ranging from metal to classical and a lot of in-between. There aren't a lot of genres I don't listen to, so I tend to find a lot that I like in the outskirts, either from friends' recommendations or just randomly thumbing through YouTube during my work day. I've come across some really great stuff that's been resonating with me recently, both emotionally and musically, so I I figured I'd do a little write up about what's been filling my headphones for the last couple months.  A lot of this will be too dark for most and definitely a little foreign, but I'd never steer you wrong when it comes to quality.  *** Michael Arthur Holloway - "Guilt Noir" Holloway was one of the first artists I stumbled across when seeking out a new genre I'd briefly heard about called "Doom Jazz." First off, I loved the name immediately, but then I took time to listen to many of the artists that seeme...

3/22/21 - Nearly three years ago, my mother was diagnosed with primary peritoneal carcinoma. It was a pretty harrowing moment for all of us in the family as there wasn't much of a history in the family of cancer. We didn't have a lot of experience dealing with it or handling it; it was a pretty foreign endeavor for us.  That was July of 2018. I spent much of that month packing up my apartment so I could break my lease and move into her basement to help out around the house and be more readily available for her should something more serious arise. Luckily, those moments were few and far between, but we had a few feverish late nights that required several baseline hours of hospitalization. This was part of the deal and I understood what my being in the same house would require of me in this regard. It was one of the biggest, but also easiest, decisions I've ever made.  Though true to form, mom didn't always need much help from me, incredibly self-sufficient woman that she...

Time is the strangest construct; the older I get, the easier it is for me to lose myself in its hours, to feel untethered and without firm footing. A minute passes and a family member is no longer an infant, but a fully-grown adult. An hour passes and I am caught drowning in thoughts of nearly a decade's worth of living that looks so much different on this side of 40. Not bad, not good, just...different and alien. A decade's worth of decisions and their impacts upon this moment in this life and this moment in this life and that moment in this life. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum .  * A year into this pandemic and I crave human contact as equally as I crave total solitude and escape from the same contact. Again, untethered and without firm footing. I am normally very firm in my belief system and, whether right or wrong, in my actions. At the moment, I find myself caught in slipstreams and incorrect placements and streaks of starshine just out of reach. This is fine for now, but I'...