Words and Spaces
Writing — the words and the spaces between — has its place as therapy and confessional.
Posts
2026-09-23
Jason and Dan at Alex's first-grade class birthday party, 2004. My sister called last week; her husband, my brother-in-law, my friend, had died. Although it wasn’t unexpected, it still hit hard. Memories came flooding back as I tried to come to terms with the loss. Dan was a large part of my life: first as a friend, then as a brother-in-law, an uncle to my children, the father of my nephews, and a husband to my sister.
2023-08-06
My relationship with words is a complicated one; my parents did not provide the best environment for me to grow up in, and I found solace, guidance, and wisdom in prose, poetry, and music. I have always been drawn to words that have meaning beyond the words and spaces used to build them, and of the many things I have read and heard, the words of Neil Peart have had the most profound impact on me. His words were a source of inspiration and comfort for me, and I found myself returning to them again and again as I navigated the trials and tribulations of my life. You know how some people have a “life coach”? Well, I had Neil Peart. It worked out pretty well for me.
2023-07-18
Emotion and poetry - written or lyrical - are joined tightly together. Tears spring to my eyes when reading or hearing Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas, as all of my emotions around my grandfather come surging forward. When I hear Beautiful Boy I’m transported back to the hospital when Alex was born, and At Last immediately reminds me of an early date with my future wife.
2023-07-13
Resilience is an interesting concept, and one we tend to view as a positive. It carries connotations of being able to push through a problem, survive an injustice, or just get things done. I’ve been described as resilient many times in my life; yet underneath that outward veneer there was a mess underneath. My goal was always to somehow rebalance the system; when the storm raged inside my goal was always to figure out a way to calm it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t doing me any good. I was treating a symptom and ignoring the fact that there was a great deal of change needed to fix the underlying problem.
2023-07-05
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Potatoes The mnemonic above was how I first learned the names of the planets in the solar system; it’s a bit dated now, since we have consigned “potatoes” to the realm of the dwarf planet and removed them from the list of first-class planetary bodies. A brief perusal through this blog will show that I like to find poetry, lyrics, and prose that have meaning beyond the words and spaces used to build them. Today, I want to talk about the Jonathon Coulton song “I’m Your Moon” and how it became a key that helped me unlock a part of myself that I didn’t realize I could open.
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