Category: memoir
-
The Long Goodbye
Four years ago, I sat in a small doctor’s office in North Phoenix and listened as my mother’s pulmonologist explained to my mother why she was coming down with a persistent cold every few weeks. “Unfortunately, it is cancer,” she said. Although she was not a cancer specialist, she estimated my mother was at stage […]
-
Notes toward an Autobiography
I have developed a new obsessive-compulsive behavior. Before I can read a magazine, I go through and remove all the blow-in subscription cards. After that, I go from cover to cover and tear out any advertising (or advertorial) printed on stock heavier than the rest of the magazine, typically cologne/perfume samples and tobacco ads (I’m […]
-
The Phenomenology of Anger
I realized, about a day after the fact, that last week represented a passage of 14 years since I first came out to another person. It happened at college. I’d been out to myself, somewhat, for a few months before, but I don’t really count that time because it was a tentative, exploratory, uncertain kind […]
-
O Academe!
Working in academia has its pluses and minuses. All summer long I enjoyed what amounted to a private city, with restaurants empty at lunch time, wide sidewalks and quads free of pushing and shoving and skateboarders, and on-campus services like the gym and library that seemed to be waiting for me to command them into […]
-
Heights
I’ve never been afraid of danger, so the other day, when I stepped out onto the glass floor of the Calgary Tower, the one hanging out over the street about 520 meters from the ground, I was shocked to discover neither of my feet had actually moved and that I was still standing safely on […]
-
Excerpt from "The Grief Muscle"
On my first day back at the gym, I was still pretty depressed and distraught about my break-up. Exercise seemed to me to solve two major problems: it gave me something constructive to do since I couldn’t sleep and I felt like I could punish something—in this case, my own body—for causing me pain. Because […]
Charles Jensen | Writer 