HeyJaredPieces of String Too Small to Use
Observations about life. And other things found in the attic.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 28, 2026
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Out Of The Tunnel (opens the original)
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The expression “Light at the end of the tunnel” has always left me feeling conflicted. I understand that to most people it implies emerging from a difficult or bad place, but to me it also evokes a feeling of hesitation. Here you are in a dark, somehow contained space, and ahead is a widening expanse, blinding. Maybe the first step out sends you plunging. Maybe something is rushing at you from the sides. Maybe that light is an oncoming train.Yesterday we buried my father’s ashes and held a memor
Maybe Heaven (opens the original)
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Yesterday, at about twenty past twelve, my father died. I was with him, with my sons and their partners, and his friend-caregiver, all wonderful humans. We’d all been on our way to other places when the caregiver called me and said dad’s breathing “sounded different,” and with a few quick messages we all turned around and headed to him. Within a couple of hours he was gone.I don’t think it’s a coincidence that dad’s last breath was taken while we were all sitting around him laughing. His favorit
This Ain’t No Fairy Tale (opens the original)
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My father is dying. While I’ve been told this before, more times than I can count, actually, this time there is no question. He no longer gets out of bed. He has stopped eating, but is still drinking, so we’re counting days or weeks, but not months.We did not have a good start, he and I. My mother was an enormous force of nature, and closely controlled access to anything she feared losing, my father most of all. She was a complicated woman, and he only saw the good in her, or, more correctly, on
Fifty-Word Stories (opens the original)
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I’m in my last in-person class of the season, this time with Nick Flynn. He’s a well-known, generative writer with a Substack called “Notes on Bewilderment,” and a slew of autobiographies. He springs a lot of homework on us, which always seems unjust to me as we’re paying him, but here we are anyway.For about ten days I was down with the plague in the form of COVID, so I wrote nothing at all. Before that I was in a class with Cleyvis Natera, whom I enjoyed immensely,
Nobody's Perfect (opens the original)
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Last night I went with a few friends to hear David Sedaris read at Town Hall. I’ve heard him read too many times to count, since he was in independent bookstores decades ago, and then at places like the magnificent high-Victorian Sanders Theater at Harvard, described by Laura Nero, I believe, as “like being inside a roll-top desk.”The last few readings were underwhelming, honestly—probably they were near-to-last stops on an endless book t
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