Tag: Mental Health

  • Just Some General Bitching (Unedited)

    I’m having a hard time getting myself motivated. To do anything, really.

    Doesn’t help that I got two rejections in the last twenty-four hours. But this is part of the gig; Lots of rejection, and trying to not let it get to you. I’m at the point now where I am beginning to think that the story really isn’t that great. Or it needs a rewrite. Or maybe I just need to burn it and rid it’s presence from my life.

    The other thing is that I have spent the past hour catching up on my flash reading. I subscribe to a large number of online journals who email out flash fiction, and I have fallen behind of late, or the whole Summer. Anyway, I’m trying to get on top of it, and see what is worth reviewing. Nothing has been peaking my interest, and I started to think maybe it’s not the fiction, but me. Maybe my head isn’t in the right space for this.

    Time to take a break.

    More like changing gears, because here I am working on the blog. I have to get in my 1,000 words a day. (You know, it’s not so much writing as it is typing, and I think somewhere Truman Capote is laughing with me.) The only way to get better at something is practice. Practice! PRACTICE!

    As I sit here, I remember once, maybe back in college or sometime in my past, there was this writer complaining how much they hated blogs and bloggers. They said it was useless writing as all bloggers do is bitch about things in badly written ways. I don’t think writer was totally wrong.

    Yet, I feel that someone needs to sit down here and take a stand to say that some writing should just bitching, complaints, and listing of grievances. Isn’t bitching a form of expression?

    Sure, it would be better if I could string this expression in a clear narrative form, that has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end – with that end being a wonderful conclusion the initial thought. That would be nice and clean and concise.

    But life is messy and not clean, and sometimes this human experience is muddy, and gross, and undefined and rough and jagged. And uses bad grammar and has typos or type-o’s, or however one would spell that word.

    Sometimes you just got to get it off your chest to move on. And sometimes you want to scream into the void that a blog. A testament, a covenant that this moment existed, and was real, and had a value to no one else other than the person who wrote it.

    There you go.

  • META Settlement; Don’t Trust It

    The biggest problem I have with huge, multi-state settlements evolving enormous corporations, is that in the end, the public never benefits. I read the story about the settlement in the paper, and this morning I have been watching all the state AG’s lining up to do the morning news shows telling us how this is a “game changer” and a “new day” when it comes to breaking the addictive nature of social media, and its hold on our children.

    As far as I can tell, META is handing over an amount of money it can afford, and setting up guardrails for teen accounts, provided the teen sets up a teen account…

    But what if a teen sets up a fake account? Seems to me that it won’t take someone long to figure out a way around all of this, and then we pretty much are right back to where we began. Which I think was the point of settling in the first place.

    I see all of this as a very interesting form of performance art, enacted in the hopes to avoid regulation. {“Please don’t touch my algorithm if you please, Mr. Customs man.”} Like, if all the tech companies hand over some money, promise to change some of their rules, then the AG’s and all the politicians will give up on that whole nasty regulation thing, right? (While you’re at it, could you stop all this business about stopping our data centers?) It’s a really fun show, as long as you don’t think about how it’s affecting and ruining the world around you.

    The truth of the matter is that this is a big game, and as long as the company and the shareholders are making money, it will continue being played. Which is why I say that if you really want these social media companies to behave, you have to go after their addictive algorithms. They make their money off of us using that piece of code. Regulate the code, and they’ll play nice.

    Until that happens, all of these settlements are meaningless.  

  • It’s Summer Vacation, and I’m Bored… (Unedited)

    We are on day two of the kid’s summer vacation, and this morning I was told by my daughter that there is nothing to do, and she’s bored.

    Ah, yes. The dreaded but completely expected statement which I knew was only a matter of time before it was uttered.

    I know that this is a sticky debate for some parents. There is one camp which is “Let the kids be bored” as that will teach them to make their own fun. The downside to this stance is that most kids, mine included, will go running to a screen… so not so much a win there.

    The other camp is to schedule the kid to do stuff, and keep the boredom away. The two downsides on this one is that parent is solving the problem and not the kid. The second point is that activities can be expensive.

    I’m trying to find a balance in the middle. I want the kid to solve her own boredom issue without running to a screen, which means that we have to set screen limits. The other side is that this might be one of my last summers to do stuff with the kid around the City, and I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to spend time with her.

    There is one other thing. If I’m spending my time with the kid, that means I don’t get a chance to work on my writing. (I only have four minutes left before I have to go off and make everyone lunch.) I’m trying to figure out a way that we can sit in front of the TV and watch the World Cup together, and I can work on some things, but that is an awful plan as I get wrapped up in talking to the kid, or watching the match.

    I also have to remind myself that the way I grew up, is nothing like the way my kid is growing up. I grew up in a suburb outside of Dallas that was full of families and kids, so every summer, I could run out of the house, and find another kid to go and do something with, and never leave the block. My daughter’s friends are spread out all over the City, and each kid goes to a different type of school, so not everyone’s vacations line up. She really can’t run out the door and play.

    Anyway… Today, we are going to kick the soccer ball in the park and draw on the couch as we watch the World Cup. That should do the trick for today.

  • Short Story Review: “A Private View” by Douglas Stuart

    (The short story “A Private View” by Douglas Stuart appeared in the April 20th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Karolis Strautniekas

    Douglas Stuart’s “A Private View” reminds me of the short stories that The New Yorker used to publish back in the 50’s and 60’s. (This is meant as a compliment, FYI…) Those stories of old were all set in fabulously wonderful Manhattan, the characters had fascinating jobs in the arts, the stories took place in some social event or interaction, and everybody had lots of baggage. There was a strange comfortability in those old short stories, yet I would never call them predictable, as they seemed to project a New Yorker contemporary literary ideal. In this light, reading “A Private View” was the equivalent of reading on a rainy day in a warm sweater drinking a cup of coffee.

    This was a story that did lull me in. Perhaps I should admit that I am a sucker for stories about mothers and sons. The more troubled the better, and for that reason, I wasn’t paying strict attention to the story, and just let it easily roll and unfold before me. Also, with characters that were from Texas, it was almost too much up my alley.

    With all of that, I still have to say that I appreciated that this was a story that wasn’t afraid to take it’s time, flesh out the characters, and sprinkle the little clues on the edges of the frame. I also enjoyed Stuart’s use of the art show and the sculptures of the stations of the cross, and his descriptions of the contemporary figures that were worked in. It played wonderful with the theme of the story, and also provided a very fertile Gen-X visual vocabulary of childhood characters that still seem to flourish in the imaginations of people of a certain age.

    But what struck me as the most honest and true aspect of the story was the relationship between mother and son, and the satellite of the sister as well. It was palatable how uncomfortable all these relationships were with each other, and also understandable why each of the siblings made the choices that they did. One couldn’t stand to be disappointed anymore, and the other couldn’t let go. Perhaps the son was closer in personality to his mother, or perhaps the sister made her decision to let go, and the son had to hold on.

    I am keeping this review vague as I don’t want to give away anything in this story, but clearly I feel you should read it. Especially read it as Stuart does an excellent job with the climax, and the dénouement. Though heartbreaking, I found protagonist decision at the end of the story melancholy in its acknowledgement of the truth. A truth was needed, for this hero had been on this journey for some time, and it was time for him to move on.

  • Spring Break Broke Me (Unedited)

    I take full responsibility for my actions. Let’s start with that.

    The kid has been on her Spring Break for the past week, and on the whole, I have enjoyed the time we have spent together. The older she gets, the more fun she is to talk to. She very smart and a very opinionated kid, which makes conversations with her enjoyable because she is very passionate in what she believes in. She’s at a fun age when the world is brand new and just waiting for her to explore it. I didn’t try to over schedule her, but we did some fun stuff like spend an afternoon at the Whitney Museum, and we shot some arrows over at Gotham Archery in Brooklyn.

    But I did make a mistake with this Spring Break; I fell out of my routine. This was the kid’s Spring Break, not mine. For some reason, I got it in my head that I was also going to enjoy some “time off.” Unfortunately, this was a miscalculation, as you see, when you are a stay at home parent, you never really get a day off. Your job is to keep the family on track and moving forward. This I lost sight of.

    What I ended up creating in myself was a feeling of anxiety, and the sense that I was letting “everything” fall behind. Everything was taking longer to do, and thus created situations where I wasn’t able to complete the tasks that were important to me; mainly writing and catching up on my reading. But if I took time for myself, then I started feeling guilty, and then those feelings rolled up into a ball angst, as I wasn’t doing enough for my family.

    I chalk this up on bad planning, and too high of aspirations, on my part.