drmstream[writing]

  This blog is an inad­ver­tent place, nei­ther com­mon­place book nor pub­lish­ing plat­form, dis­or­derly in approach but earnest in inten­tion, a bal­ance of self provo­ca­tion, hope­ful procla­ma­tion and inter­mit­tent dis­trac­tion. Despite its irres­olute intent, drmstream[writing] frames a rela­tion­ship for a kind-of writer and a kind-of audi­ence.  There is a group of you — a few […]

  An image was stuck in my head. I saw a sin­gle tree in the dis­tance. A dog stood beneath it. The vista was all greys and whites and blacks. The dog and the tree were soli­tary but sep­a­rate. The image evoked some­thing nec­es­sary and almost for­got­ten. I went to Flickr and typed in the […]

  I was at lunch with an artist today and asked him about his work. “I keep push­ing ahead and it changes,” he said. I asked him to describe a cre­ative phase that was par­tic­u­larly dis­tinc­tive. He became ani­mated as he talked about the chal­lenge of adding a third dimen­sion to his paint­ing. “I painted a very […]

  What I see clearly I pass by. What I see but do not see, I stand to wit­ness. My heart goes wan­der­ing, pulls my soul from its slum­ber, pesters mem­o­ries to give up their hard, wary shell and stretch out in child­like glee. All while I stand cap­tive to what I see but do not see. Then […]

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 […]

  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 […]

Don’t you love the com­mu­nity around your inter­ests and enthu­si­asms that you find on the web? You can’t repli­cate the expe­ri­ence any­where in real life: the vari­ety of view­points, the excite­ment of shar­ing and the feel­ing of val­i­da­tion that comes from con­sort­ing with peo­ple who see the world from the same angle but who are […]

My sense of self and my pri­vate desires got boxed in a mile high in the sky yes­ter­day. I almost didn’t make it through. I was fly­ing out to Los Ange­les for a busi­ness meet­ing. I had a win­dow seat in the front of the plane. An attrac­tive and com­posed young woman sat in the […]

The rumor spread across cam­pus like the brush fires that sparked dur­ing dry fall after­noons at the mouth of Bloody Run: some­one had got a girl up the lane preg­nant. The Head­mas­ter knew. They were going to get expelled. At first we thought it was Sam. He had a ground floor sin­gle and he took […]