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.

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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?

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

Why did I look up labubu?

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 are they 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?

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

When will Hulu pick up The Residence and why isn’t anyone calling their representatives about it?

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?

Why is Kardashian?

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

Is this menopause?

Why do people still cough without covering their mouth?

Why do I trip over nothing?

Is this covid or giving up on life?

How many things do I forget?

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 my 80-something upstairs neighbor and why is he always going to the bathroom at the same time as me?

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?

Do biracial people get half reparations, or what?

Whatever happened to reparations?

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

Why hasn’t the world stopped?

What happened to *67?

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 microdosing is equal to or greater than macrodosing?

What was before dad jokes?

How many microplastics are in me or is it menopause?

How many more pages until the end of the internet?

Why is every song the theme song from “Taxi”?

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.