Tag Archives: Mental Health

Living

To unfinished stories;

Leave a comment

UnfinishedSleep, or something like it.

More is needed.
I think.
Moving about is a product of the engine inside me. Well-fueled, and I have the energy to go from here to there.
But the opposite is sometimes true.
On days when the fog rolls in like it used to cover San Francisco when I still lived on those hills and valleys. I suppose it still does, even though I’m no longer there.
I like to breathe it in like pea soup and let it clog my pores and gouge out my eyes and fill the crevices with gray nothingness,

Continue reading To unfinished stories; →

People

Note from 1–49 W Calhoun Pl in Chicago

Leave a comment
Homeless Man (oil & wood)

The old man with long, brown and grey-streaked hair stood outside the train station muttering to the world.

It was three degrees. I could feel it, because I took my gloves off to check the temperature on my iPhone.

I could feel that familiar sting of air with barely a few degrees to it in spite of the bright sunshine overhead.

I could hear his words clearly, as I walked closer to the man.

“I don’t belong here anymore,” he said in a thin tenor to start the verse.

“You don’t know what they’re like, you don’t have a single clue,” he continued.

“I’m actually all right, all right,” he finished, as if practicing the words to a garage-rock song for a Friday-night pop-up show.

Continue reading Note from 1–49 W Calhoun Pl in Chicago →

Essay

The Middle Children of History

Leave a comment

(Photo by Sander van der Wel)

My uncle Peter killed himself when I was 15-years-old.

It still haunts me 25 years later.

I’ve never really gotten over his death, because as a family, we never really discussed it.

This was in part our Ukrainian culture and the superstitions that came over the ocean with my grandparents, partly our religious beliefs and partly my age at the time.

All I ever really knew about the circumstances that led to his death was that he was a lonely man, in spite of having a loving, supportive family and that he struggled with depression.

Last week an old friend and former colleague from my newspaper days in Missoula, Montana, the indefatigable humorist, baseball lover and writer of Fatuous Twaddle, Jaime Kelly, ended his life in his car in a park in Missoula.

Continue reading The Middle Children of History →