drmstream[writing]

  I responded to two e-mails today from young men who were look­ing for some life guid­ance.  After the appro­pri­ate pre­am­bles, I wrote exactly the same thing to both. Here are three ques­tions to ask your­self: What per­sonal skills and per­sonal attrib­utes do I pos­sess that will cause peo­ple to give me money? What kind of things […]

  There are images that stay fresh and imme­di­ate years after they first occur to you. These are the images that tell you how you see the world. Metaphoric leit­mo­tifs. They are words but they are so real that we don’t rec­og­nize them as words. Our wiring fires and takes us out of the time Now. […]

Some­times when I talk I hear my voice echo­ing in my head so I stop. In mid-gesture, mid-sentence, I’ll stop and go fol­low the echo. The moment that I am in — that absolute instance of inter­ac­tion — is sep­a­rate and unique from any other moment and I want to com­mu­ni­cate in a pre­cise and fresh way. The […]

Secrets are dan­ger­ous things. My grand­mother hid behind her secrets. She car­ried them every­where. When she fought with my mother, she’d sit on the couch look­ing shat­tered. “It isn’t that bad, grandma,” I’d say.  She’d look away, whis­per­ing in a quaky voice, ‘You can’t know how bad it is, Danny,’. When I got older and […]

I take Adderal. I didn’t used to.  I’m writ­ing an essay about it — the work­ing title is Under­stand­ing My Stu­pid. The thing about writ­ing an essay is that you have to tease out the sense in things that are loosely con­nected in your head.  Some­times the essay peters out because the things that you […]

Scene I The lights come up and reveal a grey, empty room.  Our per­spec­tive is at an angle; two walls retreat to the back of the stage and join in a cor­ner in the deep recesses of stage right. The lights dim.  Ocean sounds fill the air, the swell and wash of the water, a building […]

  It started when I butted in on a Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion between @juanviejo and @susanchamplin, two peo­ple I enjoy­ing fol­low­ing.  They’d been dis­cussing com­mence­ment addresses made by David Fos­ter Wal­lace and Jonathan Franzen. I came in strong, shoot­ing for con­cise and emphatic with my two-Tweet attack. being utterly aware of human­ness doesn’t have to cause pain. […]

  We aren’t meant to ever wit­ness lives in their total­ity.  The long view smooths out the highs, fills in the lows, and reduces every effort to the mean.  We come face to face with the over­whelm­ing scale of exis­tence, the futil­ity of pas­sion, the incon­se­quence of our work.  We might call it beau­ti­ful, but […]

When I was a boy, my mother would tell me that she had been a fat girl. I didn’t know what to make of it.  She wasn’t fat when she said it, and even when she would com­plain that she was fat, I’d think to myself that she was small and slim and not like all […]

  I know a man who was once the youngest river boat cap­tain on the Mis­sis­sippi.  He’s old now and has moved from the uncar­ing whimsy of the great river to the end­less expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.  On a high shelf in his small bed­room he keeps a neat row of hard-backed note­books.  These […]