The Bloom — memories

I don’t have a lot of nightmares, but when I do, they’re always strange and disturbing in a way that nothing else in life ever is, a bad acid trip crossed with a Stephen King story and wrapped in fat blanket of seriously freaky ugly. I had one last night. Nothing major. Just a bad dream that jolted me awake in the dark. And I lay there thinking: what’s the up with these things? If dreams are a way for our subconscious to process information and make connections we can’t see consciously, what are nightmares? Do they have a role...

Goodbye to a real trash weekend here, two cloudy, rainy, chilly, please-pass-the-down-comforter days that turned Thai food take-out and Netflix into survival gear. Sunday afternoon I was so freaking bored I actually started cleaning out my closets. At first, not much fun and Kimmie Schmidt started calling my name, but buried under the contents of my next Craig’s List ad, I found a box I’d forgotten, and the weekend got epic real fast. It was all my old travel journals, one from every trip I took between the time we went to Utah when I was 13 and the summer...

A year or so ago I had the official worst day ever. I overslept and left my wallet at home (no double latte for me). I missed my bus and the morning staff meeting, which earned me a special one-on-one with the boss, which I had right after I found out that the writing class I wanted to take had filled up before I’d signed up. Lunch ruined a new sweater with a stain I didn’t catch, and it was downhill from there. I was not slaying it. It was slaying me, and by the time it was over, I...

When I was a kid, my parents took me on a killer cross-country vacation, and it was one humungous major-league adventure. From Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the whole month was packed to the roof of Mom and Dad’s minivan with big days in even bigger places. I was about thinking about that trip yesterday because yesterday was quite possibly the most boring day in the entire history of the human race. Nothing happening was happening in my world, and everything I was doing had already been done to death. I wanted to be doing something huge—climbing a mountain, trekking...