I’m dressing down the way I write.
This summer descended on my hometown of Iași like a mother hen sitting down to roost, suffocating the city streets with layers of heat. You open your front door and the hot air is thick as you wade out into it. After sunset, the day feverishly lingers in the still air, sweltering you to sleep. Even summer’s biggest fans have been complaining, and for those of us less inclined to love sunny days, productivity has been challenging. The only way I’ve managed to write is to do it in the buff.
Or the near-buff, like I am right now.
Is this so wrong?
I’m…
The Ryan Effect is real and it’s kind of annoying
There’s nothing that makes a Brian roll his eyes harder than a Ryan. “What’s that? Your name is Ryan? Oh sorry, pal, I think I’ll pass. Nice poncho though.” It’s time we stop and recognize Ryan is just a name for someone who should really try harder. The Ryan Effect is bringing us all down.
Ryans vs Brians
My best friend in the fourth grade was named Ryan. He was a nice kid, but a bit of a slacker. He often asked to borrow my homework so he could copy from it. That sort of sums up Ryans. …
Why I keep wearing board shorts when there’s no seaside in sight.
A good friend of mine told me a story about when she was a child and her family moved from Florida to Wisconsin. I don’t remember which cities. I only remember her saying the first year in Wisconsin was cold, even by Wisconsin standards.
She said her mother packed the family’s summer things into a closet in the hallway. My friend, missing the heat and sun of Florida, would walk into the closet and take the top off the bottle of sunscreen to sniff it. She wanted a reminder of what summer smelled like.
I feel the same way about…
Here is how they changed me
Several months ago, a friend recommended eating Vegans as a sixty-day challenge. I accepted the challenge and it has changed how I’ll eat for the rest of my life.
I’ve practiced a sapien-based diet for the past four years. People often incorrectly refer to it as cannibalism. While I understand why the term remains common, it is outdated. We describe our lifestyle as sapien-based, or sapitarian. Both are correct. We’re attempting to move beyond the misconceptions and negative connotations of the past.
Sapitarianism is not an easy practice to maintain but, once you accept the inconveniences, it is life-affirming. I’m…
You can be profane without seeming vulgar
Dirty, taboo, vulgar, lewd — all describe the sweary language a gentleman supposedly avoids. Only an uncouth brute uses profanity, or does he? It turns out cursing is a lot more fucking complex than we thought.
We have a fondness for dirty words. They show up everywhere from graffiti on the streets to the halls of academia. There are scholarly works about their importance from philosophers such as Harvard’s Steven Pinker and entertaining books about their origins such as Melissa Mohr’s Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing. Vulgar words are found throughout cultures, dating back centuries. Recently, a set…
A European life spawned by a fateful beer and a strange taxi ride.
When people ask me how a surfer from Texas ends up landlocked in Romania writing for a living, I tell them it began with a beer in Salt Lake City, Utah.
There wasn’t anything special about that beer and I don’t put much credence in the idea of things happening for a reason. However, opportunities do pop up in the strangest of places and sometimes we have fleeting seconds to pounce on them.
It’s all about recognizing and then acting on life’s possibilities, such as a beer on an autumn day, a chance conversation in a California taxi, or a…
What to do when the machine thinks you’re a machine.
So, you couldn’t read all those squiggly letters in the test? Who can? Oh, wait — did you not find every boat in those little squares? You must be a landlubbing robot!
Boat spotting. Pfft.
People fail CAPTCHAS all the time but there are a few simple tricks for proving to the machine that you are not a machine.
First, request a new test. Hopefully, you get one with bikes. Bikes are the easiest. Refresh the test as many times as you like. If you get crosswalks, just refresh it. …
How to write your ending when you don’t have one.
Do you ever look around midway through the short story, essay, or novel you are writing and worry you can’t see the end? Perhaps you never had a plan to begin with? Or maybe in your exuberance, you took an unexpected writerly turn and lost your way.
In my search for ways to improve my prose, I researched the reason writers so often get lost in the middle of their stories. …
‘See you later’ is so much easier than ‘good bye.’
I learned the word ‘denouement’ in my seventh-grade English class. After hearing our teacher pronounce the word, my classmate, Eli, looked at me with a smile and said, “Dey knew ma’ than I did.”
That’s my opinion of endings. Everyone knows more about them than I do. I struggle with endings in all kinds of things — my written stories, periods in my life, events, holidays, or relationships. I linger. I loiter.
I don’t like goodbyes.
I mean, really, why do things have to end? More importantly, why do endings often break my heart?
The world goes on forever
After years of hot and cold, I found I prefer cold.
I’ve finally ended my love affair with summer. We’ve both been seeing other people for a while, but we’ve only just now reached a mutual decision to end things. Summer and I have irreconcilable differences and I want to go away and chill for a while, maybe with autumn, possibly spring.
Summer Loving
Our love began when I was young, growing up in Texas. Summer was the season when school was out and vacations were coming. Summer was the time of Six Flags and Disney Land, of family outings for ice cream or snow cones. …
Brian Abbey
expat, ex-philosopher, ex-entrepreneur writing on society, relationships, & AI singularities. VICE, Salon, & misc humor sites @brianabbey brianabbeywriter.com
