The Journal of a Middle-Aged, Middle-Management, Sub-Atomic Particle

By: | September 11, 2019

This story first ran January 17, 2019. It’s about a quark. Any resemblance to the author is purely coincidental. In fact, any perceived real-world parallels reflect more on the reader’s personal issues than the writer’s, don’t you think? You know what, stop judging me.

It’s been a rough couple billion years. I don’t know why, I just haven’t been feeling the same way as I did in the billions of years after the Big Bang. Back then, being a quark meant something – it had weight you know? Muons and leptons took you seriously, electrons wanted to get together with you and build a little chemistry.

I just … popped after the Big Bang. I had charge.

But the last couple billion years, I don’t know, I’ve just felt a little down. I feel jumbled, disordered. Maybe it’s entropy, maybe I just need a hobby.

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So I split up with my nucleus. Being part of a proton as kid was exciting, we were colliding with everything in our path and ready to take on the galaxy. But the galaxy is mostly empty space and, when you get right down to it, so is the atom. Lately it’s been like, what’s the point? It was amicable. We said we’d keep in touch – we won’t – joint custody of the ions – I’ll be lucky to get weekends. I was sad to see the fourth valence electron go, she was a mercurial as hell but a good listener. Ah well. Onward.

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Life has become a slog. I guess I’ll never be one of those top quarks you see in the magazines. I’m doing some part time work in a tomography lab but I just don’t get much from weak interactions. Everything around me these days just feels like decay. I’m guess I’m just having trouble feeling positive.

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Things have gotten worse. I can’t tell anymore if I’m spinning or everyone else is. I’m pretty down.

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Waking Up is Hard to Do

By: | September 9, 2019

Different people wake up differently. My husband instantly transitions from a deep dark unconsciousness to crisp, bright alertness as if a switch has been flipped. I…do not.

For me, waking is a mysterious, confusing, and generally quite extended process, involving the gradual understanding that the reality I have been inhabiting for some time—years maybe?—is in fact a dreamworld of my own making.

At first I feel heavy, my body an unfamiliar and recalcitrant vessel I am pouring back into like honey. Biographical details swim into view. My name is Emma. I am married to—[checks notes]—this handsome guy in the bed next to me. I have two—two?—children and I am—wait, really?—40 years old. I live in this house. At this point I might attempt a some gross motor movement, maybe a wriggle deeper into the covers.

Next, I process my emotions. Sometimes apprehending my waking reality is a sweet relief. You mean I don’t have to go back to Roosevelt High School because I am missing a gym credit? Yay! I am not a spy in deep cover trapped on a long-haul spaceship about to be discovered by ruthless galactic counterespionage agents? Thank Christ for that!

But sometimes awakening to myself means saying goodbye to dream lives, dream lovers, dream worlds of great beauty. I often dream of a vast archipelago city, a kind of Seattle crossed with French Polynesia. I frequently have close encounters with whales or animal people. I fly, or find hidden rooms full of treasure. I’m not always ready to come home.

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Songs of Home

By: | September 9, 2019


Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new research tells us. Biologists already knew the scurrying rodents tuned into birds’ alarm calls, but they didn’t realize that the mammals responded to songs about the good times, too. Content chirps suggest to squirrels that all is well. 

To me, too.

At this time of year especially I find that sounds tell a comforting story. Here at the edge of the woods, at my Virginia cabin, late summer stretches and layers the crickets’ songs and deepens the quiet. The breezes are still-warm, breathy farewells to August. Birds, less riotous at the feeder, are choosier with their calls but certainly not silent: While no longer desperate to mate, those that don’t migrate still have territory to claim.

Today a few singular voices are cutting through the crickets’ hum–though I’ll admit I confuse the bluejay’s and the red-shouldered hawk’s caws unless I hear them side by side. Somebody’s crisp piercing note rises above another’s cascading dribble. I don’t know who’s who; clearly, I need to work on my bird IDs. But September’s in progress, these voices tell me: Revel in this transitional world.

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Guest Post: Christine’s Killing Fields

By: | September 6, 2019

Years ago, when I moved into my house, I had a dream. I was going to remove all the grass, destroy the lawn and never have to mow. My yard—nay, my patchwork of service-providing gardens—would offer food for humans and animals, as well as habitat, color and deeply soothing smells. I planted all the clovers—white, red, crimson—to rehab the soil and feed the wild bees. Milkweed for the monarchs. Fennel and dill for me and the swallowtails. Anise goldenrod and bee balm for teas, a fig tree, blueberry bushes, and lots of native species for my poor insect friends who need love now more than ever. The universe laughed.

Just like every year, this spring was magical. The clover smelled amazing, the mayapples were cute, the lavender didn’t die. But then August happened. By the second half of summer, my gardens had become killing fields—invasive plants killing every tender thing I love, and me trying to kill the invasives.

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Actually, Twitter is a biowaste gasification facility

By: | September 5, 2019
It’s a plot to get our precious bodily fluids

“Twitter is a sewer,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens last week in one of the many skirmishes that have now coalesced into the phenomenon known as Bedbug-gate. The ongoing saga is quite beyond the remit of this blog (though we do a brisk trade in actual bedbugs). But I’ll take Stephens’ sewer observation. He meant it as an indictment of man’s inhumanity to man on the hell site, but by pure chance he may have stumbled upon a useful metaphor for personal data.

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Pets Are Supposed to Make Us Happy. So Why Am I So Worried?

By: | September 2, 2019

My fish died last week. I am not sure how long he lay on the bottom of his aquarium before I noticed. It wouldn’t have been more than a day, because I’d checked on him the previous afternoon. He wasn’t looking good, unmoving except for his gills, which seemed to be straining.

But then Percy (Percival L. Fishington) never looked that good. He liked to stay near the bottom, or hide in his hollow-log toy. He was probably the least engaged, most depressed-seeming betta fish I have ever had. He lived in our house for two and a half years.

Was he depressed? I have kept many fish in my life and the others have not seemed depressed, but I don’t know. It is unknowable. What is it like to be a fish? 

I worry all my creatures are depressed. I worry about my houseplants. In the miniseries “Good Omens,” the character Crowley shouts at his plants to make them grow, and they live in fear of him. (I don’t remember whether this happens in the book.) It’s played for a laugh, and it is funny to watch David Tennant menace a quivering ficus, but it also made me genuinely sad. What if they are scared? What if the plants are sad? Is it my fault?

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The Problem with Stories

By: | August 30, 2019
Sketch by Leonardo DaVinci

Earlier this summer, as I lay with my head on my boyfriend’s chest, I heard something odd. His heart — an efficient athlete’s organ that normally thumps fewer than 50 times per minute at rest— switched from its reassuring, steady bah-buhm, bah-buhm, bah-buhm to rapid staccato: bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. 

I lifted my head and asked if he’d noticed it. Pete said yes, it had happened before, and that sometimes his chest hurt and his arm tingled. I called my dad, a retired physician, and he said Pete should see a doctor as soon as possible. As Pete left for his appointment, I badgered him to not minimize his symptoms: “Make sure you say the words  ‘pain,’ and ‘tingling,’” I said.

It took a while to get the workup scheduled. When she hooked Pete up to monitors on a treadmill to do a stress test, the nurse was incredulous. “You’re too young for this,” she said. Pete is 35 but looks much younger. In fact, he looks so young that I didn’t take him seriously when he first asked me out three years ago, at the start of a long, slow courtship. In May, when we attended graduation at the high school where Pete teaches science, someone mistook him for a student, congratulating him on his achievement.

The point is, Pete looks young and healthy. He is young and healthy. But his blood pressure has been abnormally high since his twenties— high enough that he needs meds — and the doctors don’t know why. Last month they gave Pete a heart monitor and instructed him to wear it for 30 days, to detect any abnormal rhythms. They also performed an echocardiogram, using soundwaves to image his pulsing heart. Two weeks ago, we sat at our kitchen table and opened a bland-looking envelope from the VA Medical Clinic which contained his echocardiogram results. Among the findings, it listed a congenital malformation of the heart called a bicuspid aortic valve.

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