Conversations with My Nonexistent Therapist
What’s wrong? What isn’t?
Read MoreExplain It to Me Like I'm 5
I’ve heard the refrain that everything Trump touches turns to shit—sort of like a reverse Midas. Well, think about it: Trump has had his grubby fingers up America’s skirt for almost ten years. This election is our last, perhaps only chance to slap him across the face and say, no, sir!
Read MoreI Would Prefer Not To
If you weren’t an English major, you may have never encountered Herman Melville’s story Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby is the original quiet quitter. When his boss asked him to do something, he’d say simply, “I’d prefer not to.”
Read MoreSeven Years
April 20 marked seven years of me, a California native, a 24-year denizen of San Francisco, picking up and moving a few of my physical possessions and all of my emotional baggage across the country. No job. No apartment. Just a sort-of-kind-of sufficient amount in the savings account, my best friend and her couch, and the deep, undeniable sense that I had to leave San Francisco right then or I never would.
Read MoreA Little Help
Fuck it. It’s never going to happen. I’ll just be a copywriter for a pharmaceutical advertising agency until I die. Certainly it pays better than being a novelist. No need to delusionally continue to chase lifelong dreams of being an author. Clearly it’s a waste of time for me.
Read MoreThe Women Are Not All Right
The message is loud and clear: the female sex can get down with having babies or fuck off. The uterus-containing bodies are first and foremost vessels for babies. The right of women to pursue their happiness and their goals, to enjoy the full fruits of their existence is secondary to their biological ability to bear offspring. And this is where the rage starts.
Read MoreNew School
Just a form, a registration fee and $130 and you, too, could spend your next four Thursday nights standing at an easel before a blank canvas wondering who the hell you think you are.
Read MoreIt's Time for Your Self-Evalution!
It read like the journal entry of a struggling hack grappling with emotional, intellectual and creative insecurities through the fog of her narcissism. It did not read like a professional person cooly evaluating her strengths and weaknesses, her accomplishments and her shortcomings in the course of executing her work. I could see my boss rolling his eyes as he read it.
Read MoreBrunching Through the Apocalypse
The end of the world isn’t a boom and a flash and a sudden transfer into the unknowable void of the alleged afterlife. It’s not a horde of marauding zombies staggering over the horizon. It’s not a fleet of huge alien spaceships shooting destructive beams into our world’s capitals. The end of the world here in real life is a doomscroll of wildfires and floods and violence and desperate people all over the globe who are all way, way ahead of most of us in the apocalypse timeline.
Read MoreRailroaded
I was frustrated but I hadn’t yet boiled over into unmanageable emotions that would make me one of those people who weep uncontrollably on a New York City street. Yet.
Read MoreJanuary 6, 2021
On January 6, around 2:30 in the afternoon, having completed a small mountain of time-sensitive tasks, I said to myself, Self, we’ve had a very productive day. Let’s take a look at Twitter and see how the certification of the Electoral College is going.
The COVID Chronicles, Part VII: Cruel Hope, the Election Edition
But we all learned our lesson in 2016: hope can turn on you, kneecap you, face-plant you into a shit pile of uncontrollable, abominable events, and all you can do is watch in horror from the gutter where you landed. Beware the cruelty of hope.
Read MoreThe COVID Chronicles, Part VI: Existential Crisis Edition
Being an advertising copywriter is much closer to being a writer than a lot of other writers get to. Maybe I should just be grateful for that proximity and stop with my delusions of being a Writer with a capital W. So what if I never see the words “A Novel by Sage Romano” in the real world. Who the fuck cares?
Read MoreThe Eternal Work
White people will never understand, fully, the experience of existing in America while black. But it is our duty as humans and Americans to do the work of trying, even if that work never ends. Start with the African-American literature section at your local indie (black-owned) bookstore.
Read MoreThe COVID Chronicles, Part V: We're Doing It Wrong
America is understandably done with this bullshit. But, America, this bullshit is not done with us.
Read MoreThe COVID Chronicles, Part IV: To All the Bars I Loved Before
Fuck, I miss bars. (Illustration by @stillasleep13 on Instagram.)
Read MoreThe COVID Chronicles, Part III: The First Breakdown
All my careful, wobbly little guardrails I’ve put up within this new normal, all my intentional little habits, all my mindful gratitude and willful calm—fucked. Just positively fucked today. Out of nowhere, pecking out a copydeck for a client, I just lost it and started weeping.
Read MoreThe COVID Chronicles, Part II: New Normal
This is normal now. What we’re all doing and not doing—it’s now normal, in all of its alarming, sad, weird abnormality.
Read MoreThe COVID Chronicles, part I: Living the Dream
We don’t have to run from a tidal wave of sudden sea-level rise, hotwire nuclear bombs in the core of an asteroid speeding to earth, navigate a faltering C30 to the reorganized poles of the planet, fly a helicopter with our ex-wife copilot into ravaged San Francisco to rescue our last remaining child. Nope, all we have to do is sit our asses at home. And wash our fucking hands.
Read MoreWhat's a Girl Gotta Do to Get a MADAM President?
No one wanted to take the gamble on the literal smartest person in the room because she also happens to possess a vagina, because her voice is an octave higher than the comforting authority of a masculine timbre, because she was at one point in her political career a Republican. Because in countless meaningless ways she was determined by voters to be “unelectable,” and so, she became unelectable, because self-fulfilling prophecies are exactly that.
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