John Darnielle

she left behind a room all full of grandma things, things too familiar to be given to Goodwill but too yellowed to be kept out in plain view

couldn’t focus. I was agitated; the strategies I’d developed for shutting down the several tape loops running concurrently in my head weren’t working.

The noise can’t really be blocked, just bested.

stuff made by guys living in distant backwaters with no hope of ever making their voices heard anywhere, writing songs about the books they spent all their free time reading just trying to escape, playacting in a vacuum.

Over the years I have tried to figure out what thoughts, what actual words, lay in the gaps between the things my mother starts to say and the things she ends up saying.

Even small events amount to a shift in the current

my father left his arms at his sides, leaving Kimmy to squeeze his ribs like a person on angel dust hugging a stop sign