To Be So In Love

The world is still a big place. It’s the little things that make it so: It’s happiness in small bars, throwing darts and drinking beer snobs will tell you is swill, listening to townies shout to the cadence of sports-announcers’ voices. It’s walking back home as snow begins to fall and listening to the crunch of your boots on the sidewalk. It’s the warmth of the apartment when you get inside. It’s flying and falling and catching and dropping and getting up again.

The Seasons

The sun shines high from its perch in the sky. I remember riding my bike through the alley when I was a child. I slipped and fell and skinned my hands and knees. My memories are made of brick and cement and glass. My dreams are bathed in the waning sunlight of an autumn day. Long shadows creep over fences and pull at the sidewalk as the sun begins to set. My dreams are apples picked from trees and piano notes from songs I never learned how to play.

When the World Becomes Water

Water is not something you can hold onto. It’s not something you can grasp, or something you can stand or build a house on. But you can float, swim, boat, ride waves like California and Florida and Hawaii and even frigid Lake Superior just outside of Duluth, Minnesota.Yesterday it was the opposite. We fell asleep together in the bed – slept someplace other than the couch. “You’re early,” she had said, her hair pulled across her forehead, panting, licking her lips, unsatisfied.

Our Role At Present

If we are struggling with our identity now, as Americans, it is because we never fully addressed/we still struggle to address, those dark things in our history. What our country is based upon has been found wanting, so now we have been left with something of an unfinished legacy, full of half-truths and victories won on the backs of the oppressed far too often swept under the rug.

The Future of Love

We have already moved away from traditional “meet-cute” love, i.e. we’ve digitalized love through apps like Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, etc. And with the advent of “sex robots” (soon to be without such a clumsy description – “sex robot” seems how we might have thought of android love in the 1950’s), it will only be a matter of time before the accessibility and readily-available nature of artificially-intelligent partners will supersede the time and effort it takes to impress a real one.

The Guilt of Tangential Crimes

As a German-American raised in Minnesota after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, my relationship to the Cold War, to a divided Germany, and to the war that led to it, was very tangential. Talked about in abstracts, pointed out in black-and-white photos, running together with all the other great and important and terrible events in history for which – I was taught – there is no place in the world today.

A Philosophy of Food

As a German-American raised in Minnesota after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, my relationship to the Cold War, to a divided Germany, and to the war that led to it, was very tangential. Talked about in abstracts, pointed out in black-and-white photos, running together with all the other great and important and terrible events in history for which – I was taught – there is no place in the world today.

*86 Clothing

When our imaginations ran wild and unchecked. When tension that could be cut with a knife was used to make Japanese udon noodles from scratch instead, and prepare dishes we knew would taste both different and the same, familiar and new, every time we sat down to eat. When words fail it is fingers and toes, breathlessness and beating hearts, inexhaustible passion and heat of the kitchen that reminds us why we stand so close to each other. Why we fall asleep intertwined, all knees and cheeks and sweet words left on the pillow.

After We Eat

The meal, consisting of something from the garden, something from Lake Superior, and something that Ralf across the table killed with his hands for the pièce de résistance, is over. There was wine, but I’m drinking Alquimia Reserva tequila brought back from Jalisco. There was cheese; soft cheese, hard cheese, blue cheese with a funk that still lingers at the back of my teeth when I think about it.