andom writings about nothing at all. Or everything ever.
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 MoreFuck 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 MoreIt 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 MoreOn 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.
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 MoreBeing 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 MoreAmerica is understandably done with this bullshit. But, America, this bullshit is not done with us.
Read MoreFuck, I miss bars. (Illustration by @stillasleep13 on Instagram.)
Read MoreAll 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 MoreThis is normal now. What we’re all doing and not doing—it’s now normal, in all of its alarming, sad, weird abnormality.
Read MoreWe 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 MoreNo 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.
Read MoreWho’s to say everything is okay? Terrible things happen all the time. Proliferating evil in the world abounds alongside bad luck and bum tickers and rogue cell mutations and freak accidents. The shoes, they drop, they rain down on all of us.
Read MoreRather than being freed and emboldened by my autonomy I was instead all too aware of my solitude and the vulnerability that comes with it. This then blossomed into acute paranoia, as my overactive imagination wrote and directed worst-case scenarios, starring me, that played out every violent, bone-cracking, flesh-flaying, paralysis-inducing, life-altering possibility in high-def detail on the widescreen of my mind.
Read MoreIn recent years bookstores have become increasingly vexing and anxious spaces for me. What used to be places of peace are now fraught with urgency; not about which books to read, which should be the only anxiety one has in a bookstore, but rather my continual failure to finish any one of my fucking three novel manuscripts.
Read MoreMy bedtime ritual usually results in me giggling myself to sleep with my head full of bad jokes for the standup routine I do in the parallel universe where I’m unbelievably hilarious.
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