The blacktop has been cracked ever since I first took the job here. Over the years grass and clovers have grown over the ridges and onto the black valleys. Basketballs have memorized other paths toward the basket and shoes have learned how to avoid an embarrassing trip-up. The train station platform has fewer cracks andContinue reading “The Welfare Supervisor”
Category Archives: My Writing
Lunch at Back Beach
It started with the unlikely monotony of a toothbrush, a nalgene full of irony pump-water, a tube of toothpaste on its last leg, and an entire ocean. My obsession with routines— supported by the anti-routine nature of living on a boat that’s shape is entirely decided by a formation of tides, winds, and forces completelyContinue reading “Lunch at Back Beach”
College Students who are Mere Capitalist Critics and Queer Platonic Love
Lately, I have learned to love to turn my noise-canceling headphones on in my room with my picturesque forest scape and an artificial green-pond moat. I exist within these four walls and in whatever sounds I choose and that feels like the ultimate source of comfort. I guess there are two parts to this story. Continue reading “College Students who are Mere Capitalist Critics and Queer Platonic Love”
Believing in Yourself
I’m realizing that all those times I didn’t consider myself smart were merely shadows. Thoughts and reflections that follow you and copy you. That reflects your truest forms and simplest motions. I’d hear people tell me about the hours they stay up grinding and doing work and I thought that meant I wasn’t trying hardContinue reading “Believing in Yourself”
Running Out of the Woods, Facing North
There is this vivid memory I have in my head. After my initial depressive shockwave that took over the entirety of my soul for the first two weeks of the start of the Covid19 pandemic, I was looking for an opposite feeling. And for a while, I found a tiny bit of that. While IContinue reading “Running Out of the Woods, Facing North”
The Mapper
There’s a picture from a children’s book I really like. It’s a landscape in a boy’s figure who seems to be flying over an otherwise solid color. I have dreams sort of like this except the exact opposite. Instead, I fly as an empty figure over a landscape or the gentle curves of a massContinue reading “The Mapper”
An Unremarkable Hum from the TV
An unremarkable hum from the TV takes up a different space in our brains. Not the part that you use when you’re talking to your mom about additions to the grocery list or the part you use when you’re chatting to your sister about how your day went. In a tucked-up corner, in the backsContinue reading “An Unremarkable Hum from the TV”
Midwestern Marx Publication: Rejecting Alienated Labor for the “New Man”
Rejecting Alienated Labor for the “New Man”. By: Ella Kotsen A piece I wrote for Midwestern Marx was recently just published. I would love if my readers here at SDS went and checked it out.
Telling the New Year and Jeannette Wall’s failures in The Silver Star
I remember reading Wall’s Half Broke Horses one sunny afternoon when I lived on the Schooner Shenandoah. Below deck, on my bottom bunk, an upwards-facing porthole that would leak salty water when we tacked too far provided me with enough natural light to dot on Wall’s words. I loved the book, reading it practically inContinue reading “Telling the New Year and Jeannette Wall’s failures in The Silver Star”
The Stick and My Hippie Grandparents
My grandparents were never like the others. My grandma shared a dark brunette bob like my sister and mother for most of my childhood— de-aging her for all spectators who had the privilege to witness our interactions. My grandfather, likewise, was notorious for scooping up our friends and putting them in funky places on theContinue reading “The Stick and My Hippie Grandparents”
Stories, Dreams, & Spaces 