I wish I loved anyone or anything as much as The Bear loves Chicago. It’s the kind of love that feels fully realized and all-encompassing, at once over-the-top and deeply practical. I did meet a dog this weekend and immediately say, “Oh, I’d take a bullet for you,” so perhaps…

I think I was born feeling guilty, which is to say I popped into the world the ideal future Roman Catholic. My parents say that when I was little, I used to cry when I even considered breaking a rule. …

Content note: this story includes discussion of addiction and suicidal ideation. I am agoraphobic, which is to say that since childhood it has sometimes felt difficult or impossible for me to leave my home or even my bedroom. While “agora” means marketplace and “phobia” means “fear,” the reality of modern…

I was raised by someone whose job was to plan: to ensure adequate allocation of resources; to cross the t’s and dot the i’s in advance of the final rollout of a product or program; and to envision potential disaster scenarios and develop response strategies. I copied the great aspects…

Artists are known to be a bit off, inclined to sadness and loud weeping and hours of gazing into the middle distance whilst wearing black turtlenecks and/or stained sweatpants. There are all sorts of terms to describe this type of individual — “highly sensitive person;” “melancholic temperament;” “raging alcoholic with…

On sickness, health, and creative frustration — Are you tired today, too? Are you, like me, having trouble focusing on your job, on the emails or spreadsheets or cash register or fuel pump or customers or vendors or students or patients or clients or jackhammer or snowplow or the fucking malfunctioning drive-through speaker? Good! …

You’ve got to be careful with Greek mythology and other forms of journalism. In the past two years, I’ve listened to over a dozen audiobooks in this subgenre. At first I played them at night, wondering why I could never fall asleep afterwards. It took me a few months to…

Addiction, social media, and candy corn perfume — It’s a warm Halloween, and I’m wearing: blue eyeshadow; candy corn perfume; one to three Fenty Skin and/or Fenty Beauty products; Jordan 4s (Retro OG Bred from 2019 but based on a colorway he wore in the ’89 playoffs, don’t worry about it); a blue bra that nobody else can…

With apologies (and gratitude) to Hunter S Thompson — We were somewhere around Flatbush Avenue Extension on the edge of the Manhattan Bridge when the cold brew coffee began to take hold. Every now and then when life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then…