Tag Archive: writing


My Oxford French Mini Dictionary

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June 10, 2023

My Oxford French mini dictionary has a vagina but no penis. It has sperm but no menstruation. No fucking, only sex, and a pregnancy without a womb.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has honour without traitors, self-sacrifice without self-doubt.

There is a kangaroo but no platypus. There is God but no Bigfoot or Chupacabra.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has heaven and hell without apocalypse, without utopia, without rapture.

In the world of my Oxford French mini dictionary, there are workaholics but no slackers. There is neither heroism nor apathy, only complacency. Obedience without caricatures.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has knives and guns and bullets but no cotton candy, no colouring books, no dollhouses.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has no serendipity or randomness or rumination, only cold consequences. There is neither hedonism nor stoicism. There is only boredom.

There is no unpredictability.

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The measurements of life

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December 18, 2019

I measure life in bottles of vitamins. One pill per day, each day, without skipping: a measured and controlled path forward, toward whatever future lies ahead. As each bottle grows lighter and emptier, I move away from the person I had been when I began, toward the person I will be when I consume the final pill. Rinse and repeat. A chain of little bottles, back to back, tracking my progress through months, years, decades. My small ever-present companions.

Each vitamin bottle is the opposite of a time capsule: a known quantity that will disappear by a certain date, leaving behind it nothing but a plastic shell. A known known. An utter lack of surprise and the most banal imaginable method of tracking time. A message in a bottle in reverse.

The previous bottle ran out a few weeks ago. I’d started it before I made the choice, for the second time in my life, to leave behind everything and move to a new country where I knew absolutely no one. I’d started it before I drove across the continent, almost the entire length of the mighty I-90, for four days and three nights. I’d started it before I met her. Before I knew her. Before she died.

The new bottle has 365 pills. The only thing I know for sure is when I will be at the end. But as for where, or how, or even who…

One pill per day, each day, without skipping. Slowly and steadily, whatever lies ahead.

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