I Better Start Writing This Down

When I wrote this piece for my podcast eight years ago, I had no idea what was coming.

I step into the day; I step into myself; I step into the mystery.

I’ll eat you up, I love you so.

It occurred to me one day that we were always peripherally close, but that we bonded over self-destruction.

Suicide is a lot like poison ivy.

If anybody deserves the benefit of the doubt, it’s a one-day-old.

For my wife and I, with our third baby, things felt different. We were—happy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dead people lately.

Season 3 of I Better Start Writing This Down—coming this Fall.

Season 3 of I Better Start Writing This Down—coming this Fall.

When I was a kid, my father showed me a card trick.

What they wanted—was a Trump.

I feel like I owe all of you—well, some of you—an apology.

I’ll finish this and we’ll just have a quiet year. We’ll hunker down with our jobs and our apartment. The days will run right. We’ll have a quiet year.

The lights are on—and then eventually, they are more on.

You will not be laid to rest in the depths of the Washington State Convention Center. You will, however, feel like dying there.

Food is one of the strongest carriers of memory, of tradition.

I'm about to flog my mother's cooking.

Thirty years ago, an initial Christmas that lives on only as a wooden ornament, a popular children’s television show character cradling the appropriate numeral, a red ribbon, a slow, steady cursive on the back: 1984.

For such a fastidious person, my mother couldn’t keep a computer digitally clean to save her life.

Once, when you were young, you and your father were in the car driving down a city street. A siren blared out from behind. Your father pulled over and took the opportunity to explain the laws for emergency vehicles. “Pull over. Give them room. Where those trucks are going, people needed help.”

Summer vacation writing assignments were always prompted with: how I spent my summer vacation. So here’s mine.

The birth of a baby isn’t anything like they show you in the movies.

Season 2 of I Better Start Writing This Down—coming in October of 2015.

“Ocean, don’t be afraid./The end of the road is so far ahead/it is already behind us.”

There are three out-of-context facts that I want to give you at the beginning of this. They deal with sneakers, gloves, and drifts.

I want to tell you about what would turn out to be the last Christmas present my mother would ever give me.

I always thought I’d be terrified to fly in an airplane.

When I sat down to write about loss, I realized: I do not want to be forced by grief to learn how to process it. But can you prepare yourself?

Since my daughter, Luna, was born in April of 2013, my wife and I have used the same voice to impersonate her. One of my favorite lines of Luna Speak was a specific phrase. It was funny to us; it felt appropriate. Even at six, seven, eight months old, it seemed to be exactly what she was thinking, even saying, at the moment.

In the basement of my grandparents’ house, there was a bookshelf on the wall to the left. Books about the history of the mob lined the shelves. In that house, nobody spoke about the past, and by extension, neither did my father. But, like all leaky ships, the past sometimes found its way in.

I’ve got an index card in my wallet, but I’m not going to tell you about it until the end. First, you need to understand how I came to be in possession of it.

My most common dream construct is that I’m being chased. Being chased through houses, schools, terrorist attacks. I always wake up right as the capital T They are about to pounce. I jolt awake in bed, like in a movie, sitting up with a terrible, loud, intake of air. My wife will ask if I’m okay. I’ll tell her that I was having a horrible dream. Were you being chased again? she’ll ask. Yes, I will say. Are you okay? she'll ask. Yes, I will say.

I’ve reached the point where, as a writer, and maybe because I’m a writer, I’m no longer able to clearly delineate between memory, fiction, and most of all, the memories that have slowly mutated over time into something caught between a memory and a lie. A revised truth.

I Better Start Writing This Down, a new podcast from Joe Stracci, is coming in February 2015. To hold you over, and introduce you to the show, here’s a trailer. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Maybe it’ll help you to patch things up with them.