A happy group enjoys a fun autumn drive surrounded by colorful fall foliage.
My kid doesn’t believe that I do exercises. She knows I go to the gym, as she’s seen me do it. What she doesn’t believe is that, while she’s at school, I doo push-ups, sit-ups, and squats at home. She wants my wife, her mother, to take pictures or shoot a video of me working out at home. I don’t know how to feel about my child doubting me on this matter. Is she saying that I would lie about this? Or is she saying that there has been no progress in my size, so I must be lying? Or is she just making fun of me?
We rented a place in Vermont over Memorial Day weekend, and we all had a good time. One thing that I noticed about myself was that I had a very difficult time just sitting still, being quiet, and not moving. The whole family has been under a great deal of stress this Spring, with jobs and school, and life in general, so the break was needed. But, with my inability to just be calm of twenty minutes, I started to wonder if I have burned myself out, and started to get use to feeling edgy all the time; as if stress is my default state, and I need to constantly engage in something.
See, when we were driving back to New York City from Vermont over Memorial Day, we got stuck in some pretty bad traffic around Albany, and we started getting bored with our playlists. So, the wife asked what album did I want to listen to. The first thing that popped into my head was “Achtung Baby” which she put on, and it still holds up as a great album. Then the wife suggested “Ten” which was awesome to listen to as well. The kid wanted to listen to “Guts” which we all enjoyed. When we made it home, we decided that for this summer, for all of our road trips, we are only going to listen to albums. I had forgotten how much fun it was to road trip and go from album to album. Not since the days that I had a cd player in my car, had I done this.
I have been trying the “gratitude list” thing for the past month now.
In the rendition that I was shone, when you wake up in the morning, you are supposed to make a list of 10 things you are grateful for, but you cannot repeat the same thing day after day. You gotta come up with new ideas. Makes sense, because I can see people cheating at this and putting down their spouse, or kids, or dog… maybe not in that order. The point is that you start off the day on a positive note, listing what you have, or what’s working on your life, or what you have in abundance.
I won’t lie, it kind’a works. And I say kind’a because you have to have the right attitude for it.
Here are a few funny things that I have gratitude for at 5:30am on most weekeday:
(The short story “Standings” by Chang-rae Lee appeared in the May 11th & 18th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Adrian Tomine
When I graduated high school, my uncle got me a subscription to The New Yorker. He was a very smart and well-read man, and he knew of my ambitions to have a writing career, and this graduation gift, which I emphatically received with much excitement, was his way of encouraging me. I say all of this because off and on over my adult life, I have continued to subscribe to The New Yorker, and for that reason I feel fully justified, due to my extensive financial investment in the publication, to complain to the Fiction Department, and formally request they stop publishing works of short fiction which are merely excerpts from novels. I speak of Chang-rae Lee’s “Standings”, which by the magazine’s own admission “… is drawn from “A Tender Age.”” Then adds Change-rae Lee “…is the author of the novel “A Tender Age.” (August, 2026)” Though this work is an excerpt, it was published in the short fiction section of the magazine, so I will be reviewing it as a short story.
“Standings” is the type of story that suffers from the sins of being too smart for its own good, and wanting to do too much. The story is overly long, bringing in as many details as possible to give the reader the full feeling and experience of what it was like to grow up in this environment of 1976 adolescence. Not to make light of the subject matter, but this is a coming of age story of boys on the cusp of crossing into adulthood, and being unclear what to do with the rage and aggressiveness they are supposed to embrace as they try to figure out what manhood is. This is a pack of “lost boys” with no direct positive male influence, and left to their own devices, devolve into racism and violence. On the surface, this is a deep well to work with, and speaks to the potential of an engaging and enlightening story. But here, the story felt unfocused on what it truly wanted to tell, with many tangents of ideas flailing. As Milhouse would say, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?!”
Another issue that I had here was that I never felt the protagonist was ever in any peril through the course of the story. I spoke of the aggression between the boys, but the tone flipped between a comical story of boys posturing toward each other knowing that nothing would happen, to a very serious they must kill or be killed. Instead of creating a logically narrative development, such as playing at being violent leading to violence as survival, the story seemed to flip a switch. What we are given is a bipolar feeling of it just “happens,” which left me thinking I had missed a step, or an unearned short cut was taken. By doing that, the intention of the action never felt believable. The protagonist does pull out a knife at school and tries to harm another student, yet his consequences are suspension, some therapy, a bit of social ostracization, but on the whole he was able to continue on as a well-adjusted adult. Meanwhile the other boy has trouble coming out of his home due to the trauma, and another boy turns out was schizophrenic all along. Other than that…
This brings me to my last point, which is that I never felt an urgency in the writing. In my point above, I stated that the protagonist never felt in peril, and part of that has to do with the language used. The narrator/protagonist is clearly writing this story – this is a first-person narrative that would never be confused with a friend talking to us, or a person at a bar telling us this story. No, this is unquestionably a story being written, and as such, it sticks to the rules. (Hell, the knife was introduced in the second act, and was used in the third.) It felt like an undergrad working hard to get an A in a creative writing class. The narrative plays it safe and does everything right, but in so doing, it never takes a risk or displays an intensity. The thought that I had reading this was maybe you can be simplistic and minimal.
“Standings” doesn’t work as a short story, but I also admit I don’t think it was ever meant to. For all I know, “A Tender Age” could be a great book, and given the breath and space that a novel can take, perhaps all of these pieces tie together and it plays like a fine-tuned song. But in the end, this just hammers home to me that not every story should be a short story.
It’s uncanny how much this AI image looks just like me.
Just about a month until my favorite world sporting event which is run by one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. I speak of FIFA, and I am not the first person to say this, but the funniest at it would be John Oliver back in 2014. I won’t beat that dead horse again, but I will say that outside of the ridiculous train tickets to get to MetLife Stadium, or the lack of hotel reservations, or how everyone thinks the tickets are too expensive, everything seems great for the tournament! I hate the fact that everything going into the World Cup is nothing but greed and bullshit, and at the same time, the whole thing starts in a month, and I am stuipdly excited about it! I download the FIFA app, and yesterday I started looking at the schedule to figure out which matches I will be watching. I have a good feeling for a month, I won’t get shit done. No writing, reviews, or parenting in fact. Nothing will be happening other than me parked in front of my tv watching football.
I wrote in a coffee shop yesterday and it was pretty cool. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and I was a tad self conscious about it for a minute. But I needed to make a change in my writing habits as I had run into a wall and wasn’t getting the productivity at home like I used to. The main reason was that there are too many distractions at home, which is also one of the big reasons I never liked working from home. I will watch tv and nap before I will get any work done. But if I go to an office, or some place that I am paying to be at, then I have skin in the game and that makes me focus. Which is what I received yesterday in the local coffee place, that was out of my neighborhood, but still was a cool place to be.
(The flash fiction story “Rewind” by Cole Beauchamp appeared at Lost Balloonon January 7th, 2026.)
The flash fiction that I love straddles a precarious knife’s edge. On one side is the prose, the other being the poetic, and if they counter balance correctly, a beautiful harmony is created. Reading Cole Beauchamp’s “Rewind” put me right on that the edge’s sweet spot; a tactile narrative countered with an eternal instant.
The structure of “Rewind” is divided into three section, each beginning with the same first line, “I have something to tell you…” In the first section, a couple is descending down a mountain during a hike while the husband attempts to explain what is implied to be his infidelity, which the wife has no interest in hearing. The section ends with the wife accidently falling off the path, tumbling down, and all goes black, followed by one word: Rewind. The second section takes places in the past, this time the wife is making a special dinner attempting to make up to her husband for all the time that she’s been away. Just as in the first section, the second section concludes with the wife losing her footing and falling, again with all going black; Rewind. The final section takes places the night before their wedding, and them sneaking out to see each other, with the wife stating that they “can’t rewind any further.”
The three moments selected in “Rewind” are snap shots of this marriage. The first being the only one that I believe takes place in a tactile moment. This marriage is over, even if the husband isn’t aware of it, for the wife knows that she has stopped loving him. When she falls and all goes black, that ushers in the next two section which I will argue take place in her memory, existing in her own eternal instant. The second section is close to a mirror image of the first section; same opening line, the disappoints, to apologies, and the falling. The first was his fault, and now we are being shown how she was an accomplice in the death of this relationship. But the second section acts as a bridge; though it is in the eternal, the language Beauchamp uses is still rooted in factual descriptions. When the third section arrives, the language softens, the poetic is embraced, and thematically, a melancholic tone is embraced which intertwines with the recollection of the past optimism this marriage had.
No one goes into a marriage thinking that it will fail, and when things go wrong, that initial optimism can feel like it’s a million miles away in a different life. Cole Beauchamp’s “Rewind” played with this theme in a structure that I appreciated for its inventiveness, but most importantly, this was the type of flash fiction that embraced the unique qualities this form can have, which are prose and poetry wrapped tightly together.
