For the third time in as many months, I received an automated email from ebay, stating, “An item you’ve been watching has been relisted.” 

What can be said about this game that hasn’t already been said about Christmas morning? Better than that. The first day of a summer break. Better than that. Evening fireworks on the 4th of July. That, too. Better than all. A graduation, an engagement, a marriage, a festival, a celebration. An outdoor fete to anything.

Vin Scully alone in a broadcast booth, talking by himself, talking to us. Assuring the world that all’s well in Dodgeralia. Calm. Composed. At home, in a park he’ll depart at season’s end. Handpicking his words, off endless branches, branches’ branches, in a deep memory he builds, maintains over many years, keeps polished like a jewel.

It is a game of beautiful pauses, pauses that take up so much of the game’s duration that calling them “pauses” seems inaccurate; the moments of action, rather, are what interrupt the long stretches of inaction.

Ten years removed from my youth baseball experience, I find myself in a car with four baseball-obsessed college buddies, headed toward the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to see the Minnesota Twins play a mid-September game against the Detroit Tigers. I have no idea why I’m here.

I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.

I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.

The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me. 

Now Dad would have to drive us to Mom’s in the shit-mobile, which probably wouldn’t start even if he could get the car doors open. Cows were standing pinned between the car and the wall and the doors had been frozen shut since the storm even without all the extra ice and frozen manure. Dad had tried pouring boiling water over the handles days ago, but the doors only worked while the handle was still too hot then froze solid again, worse than before. 

He could kill me right now. I’m rail-thin, depression rotting the muscle off me since I got here. He’s big and strong and calls himself Faheem.

There are meetings in places that come disguised as something else.

It's the middle of winter. My last submission was rejected with good cause. It went a little off the deep end.

Congratulations! Your employer is an open-minded, inclusive institution that has discovered a method to ensure the comfort of their gender non-conforming employees, and that method is buttons.

A woman waited in line in front of me, anxiously watching the television behind the plexiglass partition. The gas station attendant broke rolls of quarters in half and dropped them into the register. A second woman spoke on screen, dressed in an orange pant suit, matching neon lipstick and a gold crescent moon pinned to her lapel below her microphone. I imagined the petroleum-wax scent her breath might leave as she spoke.          

Can imagine it: black vans with windows tinted green like bug eyes, all those bodies stolen away like women in wartime. 

In memory, we wanted to repost this gem from 2014 by Amanda Goldblatt that used Mary Tyler Moore as a lens to become a "review of friendship."

As a houseguest, I sucked. I acted like I was doing them a favor by living there, but in reality I would have been destitute without their hospitality.

Later that evening, when confronted about my absence, I told her that my grandfather said I looked sick and should go home. His senility always made him my reliable scapegoat.

...the products we couldn't get here. They'd come home with stories of innocent smiles given to bored border guards while they wore two pairs of jeans under three dresses. The trunk of their car filled with Cherry Coke and flavours of chips we couldn't comprehend. Cheap rum. Meat. Cigarettes. Electronics. 

Everything is cosmically predestined when you are stoned. She put off the trip as long as she could, eating three-day old pasta out of Tupperware. This is what they mean by mind-numbing. This is some strong shit.

I look across the street. I can see the bookstore. It’s right there. I think about kicking my way through the wall, making a sprint across the street. All before the marching band closing in comes stomping into view. Because after that I'm sunk. The flood gates will be open. And the entirety of the county's Christmas spirit will be let loose like a foul bowel movement from the asshole of a very old drunk. I decide against it.

The first seven years we dolled ourselves up as witches in black nylon and swampy grease paint.

It’s time.

My novel is my father, I am saying, and it too is the best art I could make but not the best art I will make. For I am 33 and my feminist Jungian therapist says often: the beginning of adulthood is forgiving your parents for their sundry errors.

The next day I send the above photo to a friend in Michigan. She asks if I'm fine. And what the doctor recommended. My response is typed laughter. I tell her I've been taking it easy. Staying medicated. But the chance of seeing a doctor is slim. The hospitals are over run. She's a little surprised. It's contrary to what she's been told.