Collected Works

The ledge. I remember talking you down from there once or twice. That might be the difference between you and me. You came down.

I’m not quite sure if I enjoy the sweaty-palm excitement of maybe almost falling. More likely the culprit is complacency. A person can get used to almost anything. And after this much time, one might wonder if I didn’t prefer the heights.

It sure does seem a long way…

One of those days

So it happened on one of those days when we weren’t really together. Nowadays, that was almost every day. And the calculus of our expected fidelity was never quite calculated anyway. But there was a new glint of something in the reflection of the sun on one of those days. That’s the point, I mean. It only happened because it was one of those days.

I had drinks with Jolene, and the first thing I…

Those of a certain age, and with each day I am more certain that means me, will remember the 80’s icon that famously changed his life and health when he took up jogging. He became a jogging evangelist and wrote many best-sellers on the subject as it relates to overall health and fitness. In a cruel irony, he died while jogging in 1984 at the age of 52.

I don’t know why I’m thinking of that as I…

She’s barefoot down the street in short, dirty-black chiffon; the dress a metaphor for the city, the city her only version of a meadow. The sidewalk sweats with ancient heat and recent rain. And the rough wetness cools the blisters of the patches of the balls of her feet, worn rough having so often similarly trod. The word reminds her of a line from a poem, “nor can foot feel being shod,” and she…

Important: This site is moving

After many years under this name and with this host I have been running this blog. This site will self destruct in June. My new site is kalaniperry.com; all content has been ported. Thanks for reading.

Lessons from the drive-in

I’m watching this 4-part, 4-hour series on Epix called “Punk.” There’s a scene in part 3 that interviews Penelope Spheeris, director of the seminal punk documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization,” where she says “All of a sudden you had punk. Simple. And you either got it or you didn’t. You were it or you weren’t.” It’s a perfect way to describe what is indescribable. I discovered the band…

Tell all the truth but tell it slant

I have a friend who really has a difficult time with understanding that a willful sin of omission is as much of a lie as one of commission. When you leave something out because you know including it would .substantively change the narrative and understanding of a situation then that is a lie. When I told her she was one of the biggest-maybe the biggest-liar I know,-she truthfully told me she…

This is how you fall when it’s inevitable. Falling when you stumble is laughable. The shoestring. The inevitable. Fall when you know you’re falling. Brush off the arms pulling you to perpendicular with the ground. Brush off has more intent than what happened. Shrug off is better. Ignore the whispers. Ignore the screams. Ignore the blood. Not real blood. Real blood coagulated. It makes an effort…

Rehab doesn’t work. Generalizations are not a good idea. This one is. This is not a qualitative deconstruction. There is no agenda. Look at the numbers. Crowdsource the answer. You can lie, but 1 billion nods have something in common. Listen to anecdotes. Ask anyone even tangential to the process. Yes and no questions are rare, but here, the answer, like 1+1 is always 2, the answer is no. I can…

When the bough breaks

You were cradled like a baby. The world was different for you. You were held close and warm. I was days alone.

Then things happened. I was there when it happened. I heard the shouts. I saw the blood. I saw the gun. The ambulance. I looked in her eyes. She said to me, “Intensity is your defining characteristic.”

I promise you, I didn’t choose it.

The past seems set in stone, and the future merely a possibility, but Schrödinger helped me understand that the actual future is as inevitable as the actual past. And if it were possible to somehow “know” the infinite factors that manifest in our consciousness as the present (ever fleeting), then we would know with as much precision what will happen and what has happened simultaneously and…

The original wreckage of our hope

I’m hoping that perhaps, this time, that the past can stay the past. I used to joke that I would never come back here, “What do you think? I’m stupid? Do you think I would ever let her do that to me again?”

And so it is. And here I am. Back again. You caught me looking for the same thing. What it is I can’t even say for sure. I can hardly recognize it, let alone describe it. Like the Supreme…

An alcoholic is a hit-or-miss alchemist. And that is, basically, the problem. There is a fine line, in constant unpredictable motion, between the person everyone loves to be around and that guy we all hate. The delicate balance between creating either character generally falls into the hands of the person with the vested, pointedly different agenda than the passers-by. It’s as simple as that…

I write this when I was 25. Half my life ago. Just found it on an old hard drive.

Like crystal formation, I think of life, or the evolution of a conscious existence (i.e., humanity) as a happy accident of a universe based in chaos. This chaos, though random, is a creative force and if I believe in any sort of God it is this: the unnamed, beautiful, random chaos out of which has come everything…

Memoirs are an interesting interpretation of the phrase, “non-fiction.” As if not being classic non-fiction, what is written is somehow not the truth. Recollection may fill in the details of the myth of a life, but for most, at best, it’s an imperfect Xerox, an amalgam of memory, ego, denial, and self-preservation.

This is my version of the story. I have the kind of memory that lets me close my…