It was 10:30 PM and I had one more chore: build an Easter scavenger hunt for a four-year-old. I tried to outsource it to an AI bot. Then I looked up at my dad’s painting.

The night we got to Maine, I slept on a love seat. Not a couch. A love seat. What followed was three hours of delirium, a trash bag curtain, and a wasp nest.

What’s the amazing thing, you ask? It’s a red maple tree that is flowering outside my house right now. That’s not amazing, you say? Well, have you considered the fact that every one of those flowers is a sex organ? I don’t mean that as a metaphor. That’s literally what they are. Inside every bloom […]

When I saw the car approaching in the distance, a familiar mixture of concern and wishful thinking soaked into me. As they got closer, the concern turned to spite and the hope that they’d slow down drained away. I squared my body up to them. I wanted them to see the look of disapproval on […]

The love I feel for my kids is measured on an astronomical scale. I look into their eyes and I’m launched into hyperspace, soaring through the astral planes of consciousness, one with all that is, was, and all that isn’t. Lightyears are insufficient to describe how far I would go for them. I gaze into […]

In seventh grade, I decided to study the effects of ultraviolet light on plants. I chose that topic because I was really into the idea of mutation. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. X-Men. The cultural idiom at the time that radiation gives you superpowers and not, you know, a slow and agonizing death. So I bought […]

Gus needed an MRI when he was four months old. (Spoiler: he’s fine, everything turned out fine.) Our options were to either inject him with radioactive dye for imaging or do an MRI without anesthesia. As great as it sounded to turn our son into a human glow stick, we opted for the MRI. The […]

A Retraction Old Man Winter and I have had our ups and downs. As a kid I loved him. Then I was an anti-winter curmudgeon for 15 years. Then I tried to use him to biohack me into a better person. Since having kids, though? I’m a straight up hater again. It’s not even the […]

The week before Thanksgiving, our house briefly became a full-blown disaster zone. Our fourteen-month-old had already powered through six ear infections in his first year of life. In an effort to avoid nuking his entire microbiome with antibiotics, we decided to move forward with ear tube surgery. As surgeries go, it’s minor. But it’s still […]

There’s a photo I took a while back that’s stayed with me—not because it’s technically perfect, but because of what it holds. It shows my mom and my daughter laughing together. A real laugh. One of those big, open, surprised-by-joy laughs that kids are so good at pulling out of people. What you can’t see […]