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Monday 4/20/26

Things are horrible here. I'm in a bad place. I'm not going to say too much right now because 1. I don't want to frighten you and 2. I don't want to open up and then perhaps see nothing in following. I just want to say what I just said. Right now, I'm looking at getting things in order. Getting some stuff to my sister. The place I'm in right now...I feel like it's the end. But again, I just want to say these things. It's a little different than me saying things to myself. It's after 5:30 PM now. I've been working since 12:15 this morning. I haven't showered. I started to walk to Charlestown, but I stopped halfway there and instead cried in a field where no one could see or hear me as it poured. Then I came back and just sat here. Updated the Op-ed section on the site. I don't know why I bother. Ninety-seven op-eds in print, as it turns out. And not a thing has come of any of it. Just more animus my way over this other thing I do so well and which I never had done at all not even ten years ago. The rest of the site is hopelessly out of date. Which also doesn't matter. I wrote some people I didn't want to write. That will go poorly. Even if it didn't, there's little point and next to no money. And then I worked some more on "Dead Thomas." Most know me well enough here to know that anything I say about this story isn't me boasting. It's as fine a thing as there is. Any kind of thing. I want to at least finish There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. I can't say it's my masterpiece, but it is a masterpiece like no other, even if no one will ever see it. This is annoying perhaps, because I'll send you the full story soon. And "Love, Your Mouse." And "Still Good," which itself is for There Is No Doubt. But let me just share the first page of "Dead Thomas" now, okay? This story is just...yeah. It starts out with this dead kid showing up in third period English class. And we think that's what the story is going to be about. And it is. It isn't a red herring. None of those here. But then Bonita's (who is the narrator) friend Rachel falls for this dead boy--who is in limbo--and we think it's going to be about that. And it is. But then we learn what the story is most about. It's overwhelming, and the prose does things that prose has never done. And we go from there until it all comes together in the end.

“I could go at any time,” Thomas would say like he knew exactly when you needed to be reminded. “It’s nip and tuck—simply how these things work.”

He spoke as an authority with a hint of someone messing with you a little. If a man who wasn’t happy in his career came to our school to give a talk on duckbill platypuses, I’d have expected him to sound like Thomas. It wouldn’t mean he was lying just because I didn’t understand how those creatures were real despite the video evidence. And sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to make your day bearable.

Even Thomas didn’t know the precise label for his status, or his state, I guess, and it had happened to him, though he possessed this attitude of someone schooled in a galaxy beyond anything you’ve known.

That isn’t me making a play on words like my friend Rachel or not caring about higher planes and how they pertain to third period. You don’t encounter the power of other worlds that often, even if realistically speaking the duckbill platypus guy could tell you anything about those animals—that they changed color and levitated—and you’d be like, “Okay…” and that’s how it went with Thomas.  

We were fifteen minutes into Ms. Kathleen’s English class the day we met him. He knocked on the door and waited a couple seconds in the hallway like he was grown-up enough to understand that’s how you did it, until Ms. Kathleen said, “Hark, a visitor,” in her weird, “I’m a Medieval lady” voice to us, and a hearty “Enter, knave,” to Thomas, who did.