A NOTE: Works-in-progress like this one will likely be paywalled going forward. Don’t sleep on the house parties. Join the fold.

xo Blaise

1. Silent Generation

I grabbed my green Bic lighter and my pack of Camel Lights as soon as dad walked out the door for an overnight trip. The thing about it was that I’d been living with him full-time for three years and he’d never gone away for more than one day. Not once. Even when he’d drive four hours to see Nana, he’d turn around and drive back the same night.

I was pretty sure it was because he was afraid of what I might get up to if he was gone too long, but I was raised on cable and movies of the week so I knew throwing a party would do irreparable damage. Smoking in the house would be my only delinquent act that Saturday. In the house, at least.

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I sat in one of the Mexican chairs at the round Mexican table. They were traditional, handmade from natural cedar wood and leather. (They’re called equipale, but I didn’t know that then.) Dad brought them back from Mexico. We’d been there a few times when I was almost too young to remember, but I remember some things. The chairs are cool and homey but not the most comfortable. I once asked my dad, who had lifelong back problems, why we didn’t have a couch. He said, “because I’ll just sit on it and watch TV all the time.” So he watched TV all the time in the back-breaking Mexican chairs instead. I didn’t see how getting a couch would make much of a difference.

The house was quiet, clean, and airy for a house that had a lot of shit in it — clutter but in the form of ceramics and wood sculptures and framed art and plants and books and art magazines and glassware, newspapers, and family antiques. The sun pressed through the open windows, an early breeze whispering through the sliding screen door from the back porch. I fiddled pensively with the heavy glass ashtray, turning it one way, then the other, and took two deep, slow drags from my first cigarette of the day. This was freedom. I needed coffee to go with it.

I pushed out my chair and placed the lit cigarette in the divot of the ashtray. I stepped into the kitchen less than 100 feet away to make Maxwell House instant from packets I’d lifted from my two-day-a-week summer job. There was no coffee maker because dad didn’t drink coffee and he didn’t think I needed to either. When the coffee was ready I added milk from the fridge and sugar from the bowl, tasted it, added more milk and sugar, stirred it, tasted it again, and tossed the spoon into the sink.

Sometimes I didn’t understand how time worked (but I didn’t understand that at the time) and I miscalculated how long I was taking in the kitchen. When I went back to my spot at the table my smoke had smoked itself — all the way down to the filter, which now laid to rest on an ant hill of its own ash and dust, and the only sign of its former life was a black hole burned into the leather table.

I stood there with my mouth open, staring at a hole the size of two thumbnails. I thought hard about what to do now, suppressing the part about how my cigarette could have started an actual fire that burned the whole house down. Also, my cigarette was wasted; I only had two drags of it. Fuck. There was just no way to fix the hole, not that I could think of, no way to cover it up so dad wouldn’t know. There was nothing I could do, so that’s what I did.

Dad said nothing the next day. Not even the day after that. Days kept passing by without a word about what I’d done. I fretted and cringed constantly. I knew when he was sitting at the table, maybe reading the paper or opening the mail, because I could hear the creak and crunch of the stretchy pigskin from my bedroom. Those chairs sounded almost like a bean bag chair giving way, adjusting to the weight of a person. And of course, I could hear the TV that sat on the wood console dad built. It was always at least five decibels too loud. You could hear it from the sidewalk.

It was just like it normally was. We’d sit at the table next to each other sometimes, together but not really together, eat dinner or whatever, maybe trade a few sentences back and forth. Every time I was in that room I’d casually put my plate or whatever I had with me right over the hole. I didn’t want to remind him it was there. Mostly, I didn’t want to see it.

Then one day, a patch over the hole appeared. I knew dad had found some leather from a stockpile of random pieces in his art studio at the back of the house. He’d cut it to the exact size of the hole and glued it down with something. The color matched perfectly. He must have saved some leather from the old Mexican chair that had finally ripped apart at the seam.

But the hole wasn’t a perfect circle to begin with. The edges dad carved were clean, but the patch had to fit inside the hole, not over it, in order to maintain a smooth surface. There was an outline of the burn hole; like, whatever the story was behind it had been traced with a fine tip Sharpie. You couldn’t make it disappear. Anyone who looked at the table could clearly see something had happened there, but my dad and I were the only ones who could say how or why.

2. Please Go Away

Mom moved again. She bought a stucco house on a dead end road. I was 12, and it was our fourth move. I hated the new house. It was ugly and I was sick of moving.

Down the road on the corner of a suburban thoroughfare, there was a travel agency with a marquee that read “Please go away.” We drove by it almost daily. It bothered me every time I looked at it through the car window, and I always looked at it. I thought the sign meant they’d gone out of business, until I noticed that the office was open one morning but the marquee still said “Please go away.” So then I thought maybe the sign went up every day at 5:00pm, but that didn’t seem right. I couldn’t make sense of it. Finally, I said something to my mom. I told her the sign was rude, and I told her they couldn’t expect to do business at a travel agency if people think they’re being told not to even go into the travel agency to do business in the first place. My mother explained it to me. I said the joke wasn’t very funny. After that, whenever we’d drive by, I’d look at the travel agency’s sign with an evil eye. It still gave me a real bad feeling.

3. Ways To Get Around

My half-brother and I happened to be standing in dad’s kitchen at the same time, looking for something to eat. Whenever he’d visit dad, I never knew how it was going to go. Even from the moment he’d walk in the door, there was just no telling whether or not he would even speak to me.

One thing about my half-brother: he loved doling out unsolicited advice and telling everybody what they should do — like, about anything. He’d lived in New York ever since he graduated college. I was a college sophomore about to move to New York for a three-month field work stint. So he started giving me instructions on how to get around the city.

“You gotta know the rules,” he said. “Never look up at the buildings. Someone will think you’re a tourist and they’ll mug you.”

He chuckled to himself, but he wasn’t joking.

“And if you’re not sure where you’re going,” he went on, “or you realize you’re going the wrong way, don’t turn around and don’t stop to ask anyone for directions. Because if they know you’re lost, they’ll think you’re a tourist. And they’ll mug you.”

He laughed again.

“What you do is,” he said, “you walk around the block. You turn the corner, then another corner, then another corner, until you’re going the right way.”

I road tripped to the city with friends. I went with my mom to visit my uncle all the time when I was a kid. I’d been there more than enough times to know that walking around the block meant you could forget about getting anywhere on time. One New York block is a long-ass walk.

My second issue with his rulebook was that I have no sense of direction and I can’t do math. You cannot teach me north-south-east-west, or how to understand numbers. Many people have tried. Far, far too many.

I told him all this. I knew what I was talking about. Like, if you drew a map of my route it would look like a platter of linguine.

“Nah,” he said, “You’ll do fine. Don’t talk to anybody and don’t look anybody in the eye. It’s simple!”

He was pleased with himself for mixing comedy with telling me what to do. I laughed too, but he’d been at the house for two days and these were the first words he said to me.

Another thing about my half-brother: when he was a kid dad abandoned him and his older brother and their mother for my mother. Also, they were a black family, and my mother is white. Also, when dad said to him, “you have a sister,” I was already three, and he was in middle school.

I was never his favorite person.

“I’m not following those rules,” I said.

“Look, just walk like you mean business. Look like you know where you’re going, no matter where you end up,” he said. “It’s the only way to get around unscathed. I’m telling you.”

4. Return Trip

I’m coming home from a weekend at dad’s. I’m on Amtrak and we are almost at Penn Station. Ten minutes to go. Dad’s birthday is around the corner on August 30th, so I plan to go back.

Lately I’ve been experiencing what they call anticipatory grief. My dad uses a walker now. He only sees out of one eye, and poorly at that. Botched glaucoma surgery. He squints with the other eye, though you can’t really tell until he opens it. If he keeps it open he sees shadows and black spots blocking most of his view. He says it feels like there’s pebbles in his eye. He also can’t hear well even with his hearing aids, which I think is not just about the quality of the device.

A white woman in the window seat across the aisle from me gets a call. Within seconds she’s almost howling. “No,” she sobs. “I’m so sorry,” she says. The conversation is fairly brief.

When she gets off the phone she is inconsolable. Her partner in the aisle seat directly across from me keeps his hand on her leg, calmly leaning into her. The train car is otherwise quiet. It’s impossible not to hear. It sounds like the person who died was somebody’s daughter — is somebody’s daughter — though when I read this to myself once I’m home, I will pause and think, wasn’t it somebody’s son? Now I’m not sure.

I hear the woman say to her partner, “I was so scared it was my dad.”

I remember I have a clean napkin in my bag from breakfast and I want to give it to her. I hold by the corner and reach across the aisle. She doesn’t notice. Her head is down and she’s wiping her face with her hands. I hand it to the guy. He puts his hand lightly on my arm and says thank you very much. He smiles at me. Then he places the napkin in the woman’s hand. She doesn’t look up, just takes the napkin and presses it against her face. I want to turn around and go back to the place I just came from.

I don’t know yet that my dad will die the following year, but in a way I do.

Blaise Allysen Kearsley is a black biracial Brooklyn-based writer, teacher, coach, and the founder of the HOW I LEARNED live show and online magazine. To learn how to pronounce all of her names, visit blaiseallysenkearsley.com.

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A Short-Short

A Few Thoughts About Sin by Abigail Thomas | What Comes Next?

I spent the evening before bed listening to the news, and wound up nowhere. Maybe my time could have been better spent. I could have tried doing something useful. For no particular reason, at least nothing that travels in a straight line, I look up the word “sin.” The earliest Indo-European Root for the word “sin,” is the verb “to be.” Sounds hopeless, right? I burst out laughing. To be is to sin. And vice versa.

A Reported Piece

Can We ‘Shroom Our Way Out of Depression? | DAME Magazine

The great Stacy Lu wrote this piece last summer, edited by my friend Kera Bolonik, about women microdosing psychedelics for their mental health. In my case, a one month supply of mushrooms isn’t cheap and the pandemic-inspired microdosing ritual I started eventually boiled down to one decision. It was either shell out the money for maybe-magic or stick with pro therapy. Couldn’t do both on the regular so I went with what I know best. Shit, that might have been the wrong decision. The key to managing “wellness treatment” might be the way that many of us approach paid Substack subscriptions and streaming services in a world where saving our pennies is actually pointless. Remember pennies? If we’re able to afford one modality, maybe we alternate with another financially comparable one. Pause one, resume the other, repeat. Wax on, wax off. After a month of torturous talk therapy, you just reward yourself and peace out on a psilocybbatical. You have to take a break from psilocybin anyway or you’ll build up a tolerance. Is this a solid healthcare plan? It might be. Anyway, I’m just thinking out loud here. That’s what a magazine is for. Also, I’m not sure if you can tell, but at this current and very particular moment in time, I am not actually doing any kind of therapy. Enough about me — read the story. (I’m also in the story.)

A Word

How To Slay A Dragon by Rebecca Dupas

Speaking of everything, watch this 3-minute clip. Pause, put your jaw back on your face, take a breath, and thank me after.

Hey, y’all. Happy New Year.

By which I mean, I hope you end up having the kind of New Year’s Eve you actually want to have. And we’ll take 2026 one day/hour/anywhere from 20 to 3 minutes at a time. Yes?

xo Blaise

Guess who’s 6 months old. Yes — the little independent How I Learned series baby magazine project. It takes a village, and paid subscriptions and donations do the most to sustain the work, support the writers, and allow us to offer stuff for free. Every bit helps. Thank you, and we’ll see you at the family reunion.

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I was walking home from Soundtrack where I’d stopped to buy the new Elvis Costello release. I bought it on CD, the year was 2003, and, of course, Soundtrack is long gone. Napster was my obsessive go-to for music then. The rising cost of vinyl records and compact discs superseded my good intentions (supporting the artists), despite the time it took to download mp3s (I was on dial-up).

At the corner of 7th Avenue, somebody behind me said in a gentle baritone, “Excuse me…”

I knew what was coming. This person was about to ask me for directions. It happened all the time. Strangers asking me for directions on the street, on the subway, standing on the platform. What they can’t tell by looking at me is that I have no sense of direction. Even when it’s a familiar route and I know the way, I misremember or miscalculate. Instead of saying “I’m not really sure,” I spend the rest of the day thinking about the hordes of innocent people wandering around, lost in New York City, because they’d all asked the same person the wrong thing.

This time was different, though. I was a mere five blocks from my house in a neighborhood I’d been in since just before 9/11. I was ready. I felt confident. My time to shine.

When I turned around, there was a brown man standing at my height, by which I mean short. He wore a brown suit and an early-aughts goatee.

“I just saw you in the record store,” he said. “I wanted to say hello.”

I searched his face. It was rare to see another black or brown person in Park Slope.

“Forgive me,” I said, “but do I know you?”

“I’m Joseph,” he said.

He reached out to shake my hand and asked for my name. I said Felicity. I don’t know. It was the first thing that came to mind.

“It’s a pleasure,” he said. “I wanted to ask you if you’d like to go out with me sometime.”

I smiled politely and told him I was married.

Sometimes when I rode the subway or walked alone I’d transfer one of my rings, a silver band, to my left ring finger to ward off unwanted attention. It worked most of the time, except for strangers in need of directions. But I hadn’t done it that night.

Joseph looked disappointed and awkwardly expectant.

He held out his hand as though he hadn’t held it out one sentence earlier. “Still,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”

When I turned onto my street a minute later, I placed him. He’d approached me a year earlier, in the same way, on the same street. The details were coming back.

I was walking home after I’d been dumped for a woman named Vanessa who was cheating on her husband with my boyfriend. (Later that week my therapist would roll her eyes and say, “of course her name is Vanessa.”) So I was feeling pretty good about myself, my future, and just, you know, life in general. Then a man appeared out of nowhere.

He said excuse me and introduced himself. I said hello.

“I saw you walking down the street,” he said. “I actually wanted to ask you if you’d like to go to Santa Fe with me.”

I looked at him the way you probably would have if you were me.

“No, no. I mean Santa Fe Grill. For dinner.” He laughed.

“Thank you, but no. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m Joseph. It’s a pleasure to meet you anyway.”

It was a shitty night and I was heartbroken. I just wanted bed, ice cream, TiVo, and the balls to tell the husband about his wife and my boyfriend.

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I was perturbed by Joseph. Then I felt empathetic. Then something akin to what the fuck.

Sometime in the late 90s, around the time I first moved to New York, he came up to me when I was on my way to work.

“Excuse me,” he’d said. “I’m sorry to stop you so abruptly this morning. I saw you walking to the subway and I wanted to say hi.”

He handed me a piece of paper with his phone number on it and he told me his name was Joe.

“Sorry,” I said, “I have to get to work.”

He told me it was a pleasure meeting me.

Maybe Joseph just never recognized me. Or maybe he did, but he assumed I wouldn’t remember him. Maybe he said to himself, THIS time.

I wonder how many women he approached in the same manner over the years. Was he strictly Brooklyn or did he cover all five boroughs? New York is big and lonely and full of strangers, and a lot of ways to get lost.

I wouldn’t know that guy if I saw him now. Not unless he introduced himself.

Blaise Allysen Kearsley is the creator of the How I Learned live show and magazine. For writing workshops, write-ins, select essays, and how to pronounce all of her names, visit blaiseallysenkearsley.com

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I woke up and remembered it’s my birthday. I remembered the security of knowing my dad would be the first to call. I keep remembering the call’s not going to come in between moments of somehow thinking it still could.

A few memorable birthdays:

A guy called Peter The Jester entertained us at my sixth birthday party. When his routine was over, my friends and I jumped him in the front yard. Just a pile of shrieking, googly-eyed girls in grass stained party dresses falling into his lap, wiggling up on his shoulders in white tights and scuffed patent leather shoes, screaming DON’T GO while the little bells on his red and black fool’s hat jingled SOS.

At my fourth grade birthday party a classmate named Huckleberry kept cutting up inappropriately. He was disrupting the very important gift-giving portion of the afternoon so I put him in a time-out. He sat quietly at the bottom of the staircase watching me tear open my presents. At some point I told him he could come back and join us but he shook his head and stayed where he was. He did not care for any of it and I do not blame him for one second.

I had breakdancers at my 7th grade birthday party because it was the 80s. The crew was supposed to do some high-level breaking on our dead end suburban block but when it started raining, we went inside and pushed couches, chairs, coffee and side tables against the walls. The backdrop for the breakdancing battle had become a mauve and beige living room with portraits of naked ladies painted by my grandmother. My friends and I sat on the floor and looked up at these white, lanky b-boys who stood in the middle of the room trying not to laugh. But when the breakbeats started they were popping-and-locking, top-rocking, head spinning, all the power moves. The sound of parachute pants and Adidas Superstars squeaking on the floor was orchestral. There was also a DJ who looked like a teenage John Travolta if John Travolta was also teenage Billy Joel. I decided to have a crush on him. He was not very comfortable at my party and, just like with Huckleberry, I do not blame him for one second.

My college friends threw a surprise party for me sophomore year. Mitchell Baker baked two square chocolate cakes and used silver sprinkles to draw dicks on each one. He stuck the candles into the sides of the cakes so as not to puncture the metallic penis art. The dorm room was thick with smoke and bodies. (Later, I had could-have-done-without-it sex with a guy who drove a green BMW with a Phish bumpersticker on it. Can you hear the sound of the descending four-note trumpet? I bet you can.)

There have been memorable birthdays in New York — during “First Adulthood” and now “Second Adulthood,” which are terms thoroughly expounded on in Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. That subtitle alone makes me upset. But three years ago I decided that, going forward, I didn’t want to make a thing of it (but it’s September 15th; write that down).

So I ate that whole month of September like it was my last meal. I’d have to look up what-all I actually did because my brain is a craggy sieve, but I know I manifested the shit out of Virgo season.1 And that was that on that.

Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for the breakdancers and the sugar highs and the dick cakes and the sloppy East Village and Brooklyn booze fests and the friends who showed up for those events even when I didn’t show up for theirs. I know my good fortune. It’s also true that birthdays can become a not-what-they-used-to-be thing as you get older, some friendships fade away, and you can’t to talk to dead people on the phone. I don’t dislike birthdays(?). I just don’t want to have them(?). But, I mean, what is the alternative? The alternative is no longer being here or never having been born.

So I woke up this morning and remembered my birthday and I remembered that my dad wouldn’t be calling like he used to. But I can hear the call in my head. I know what he would say and how he’d say it; sincerely and a little surly. I don’t know if the “used to” part is something you get used to, or what.

1

There was one minor issue which I refer to as The Amazing Ratastrophe but that’s a story for some other time and/or a story I may never tell at any time.

---

Blaise Allysen Kearsley is a writer, teacher, coach, artist, and the founder of the How I Learned live show and magazine.

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I have questions.

What the fuck do you mean it’s August?

Why did The Residence get canceled and nominated for an Emmy at the same time?

Who will be the next celebrity to go on the Bezos cock-rocket ship and when it doesn’t make it back down to the ground will the celebrity be Leonardo DiCaprio in disguise?

What if on Mars right now it's just Anne Hathaway?

Why did I look up labubu?

Is this menopause?

Is there an ad blocker for your brain?

Whatever happened to me knowing how to use a computer?

Whatever happened to drowning in quicksand as a danger that lurked in every corner?

Does anyone remember the month of June?

When do we run out of superhero movies?

Why is Substack like this and why am I on it?

Who has more tabs open, me or me?

Why does the New York Times think I’ll resubscribe if I only have to pay one dollar for their bullshit?

Why do dogs have toe beans that smell like Fritos and why haven’t they bottled it yet?

Why have I lived this long without seeing a man slip on a banana peel in real life?

Why does it take two to four years to become a law enforcement officer in Europe and in America it takes “several months”?

Which lawsuit is anyone filing five minutes from now?

Why is the worst person in the world so many people?

Yes, but which country is actually the best one to live in? Asking for a multi-ethnic friend.

Why can’t pets peacefully pass away when we do and not a moment before?

Have you ever seen a baby pigeon?

Whatever happened to the pu pu platter?

Can I be in a relationship but not have to have them in my space, not have to meet their family, go out with their friends, or ride bikes with them everywhere, yes or no?

How long will it take someone to find my body when I choke to death on a Cheez-It?

Why can't I ever find where the buttons are on the web screen and why isn’t somebody calling their representatives about this?

Why does The New Yorker online have book links to Amazon?

How do I self-report myself?

What’s Tom Cruise doing with his time?

Where is Shelley Miscavidge?

Why was the first R-rated movie I snuck into “The Mean Season”?

When is it too much peanut butter?

Why are movie theater screens the same size as streaming?

Why do people tell you the price is reasonable when actually for you the price is a billion dollars?

Why hasn't Lumon gotten back to me about my application?

Why is Adrien Brody?

Why do I drop everything on the floor all the time?

Why have I turned into my parents after explicitly stating several times aloud that I would never turn into my parents?

Why are all the late night talk show hosts white men and who is doing anything about it?

Why does a 6 oz cup of coffee cost twenty hundred dollars?

Why am I like this?

Is it menopause or is it just Gen X?

Where did all the Black Lives Matter signs go, because I thought they’d be in the windows until every black person in this country was “safe” or did I misunderstand white women who thought putting up signs would save us?

ANYWAY

Why is Kardashian?

Why do people say silverfish are harmless when they can totally crawl across you while you’re sleeping?

Why do people still cough without covering their mouth?

Why do I trip over nothing?

Is this covid or giving up on life?

Is anyone having trouble hearing movie dialogue to the point where they have to turn on subtitles and, if so, are they younger than me or no?

How does anybody do the dishes?

Why hasn't anyone come up with a better way to defrost a fridge?

Why am I always going to the bathroom at the same time as the 80-something neighbor whose apartment is directly above me and is the exact same layout as mine and why is he always going to the bathroom at the same time as me?

Do biracial people get half reparations, or what?

Whatever happened to reparations?

How long must we as a country wait for a viable explanation for Keith Urban?

Why does every ER attendant look like they just graduated from 9th grade?

Why does my shoulder still hurt from four weeks ago when I opened the medicine cabinet?

Why hasn’t the world stopped?

How do we get Chadwick Boseman and Malcolm Jamal Warner back?

How do you go on vacation?

How do you open this?

Why do you have to write your book if you want to finish your book?

Why do people at the coffee shop put their feet on the chair and why do they pretend like they don’t know I’m staring at them and also taking their picture?

Why is scanning items at the grocery store irritating and satisfying at the same time?

Whatever happened to the 2010s?

How much micro dosing is equal to or greater than macro dosing?

Why is every song the theme song from “Taxi” or is it menopause?

What was before dad jokes?

How many microplastics are in me?

Who the fuck is Jellyroll and why?

How many more pages until the end of the internet?

Blaise Allysen Kearsley is a writer, teacher, coach, and the founder of the HOW I LEARNED live show and online magazine. For more than you need to know, visit blaiseallysenkearsley.com.