A Daily Message

Dear Hope Nation, As I write this, I’m looking at a woman who is looking at me. It’s disconcerting, since I’ve been doing this for 30 minutes or so, all in the name of a project I’m very excited about. As you may know, I have three daughters in their 20’s. They get along well…

Dear Hope Nation, You matter. I matter. We matter. That’s how I end of these letters and there’s a reason for that. Like many of you, I’ve been in that place where there is no friendly direction, where I rotated between being invisible or disgusting or embarrassing to the folks around me, where the mere…

Dear Hope Nation, Archaeology has to work with the stuff that gets found.  For instance, much of what we know about Roman Britain isn’t based on written records left lying around for 1600 years; it’s conjecture drawn from types of pottery and crockery exhumed from the earth.  It’s all a matter of inductive reasoning—drawing conclusions…

Dear Hope Nation, A trigger warning: if long intricate profiles of people are not your cup of tea, you shouldn’t read today’s letter. Go grab a cup of coffee and find something shorter. This is a lengthy read. Good. It’s just us now. We’ve cleared out the folks for whom reading more than 1000 words…

Dear Hope Nation, Happy New Year! As I write this, it’s 6:58 am, January 1, 2021. It’s my 14th consecutive New Year’s Day without a hangover, without remorse and without that gnawing sense I’d done something awful or humiliating during a blackout the night before. I am aware of everything I did last night: –Made…

Dear Hope Nation, I haven’t had a drink or used any mind-altering substances since May 21, 2007, which seems a long time to many of you, long enough to raise the question of why I continue to go to meetings and focus daily on my recovery. “After 13 years,” I can hear some of you…

Dear Hope Nation, [Attention deficit disorder is, no doubt, a serious condition. Having lived 62 years without ever being sure what my last thought was or where my next one will take me, I have little doubt I am one of its afflictees. Regular readers have no doubt noticed my “fluidly abrupt transitions,” in the…

Dear Hope Nation, I try to write for the next-to-lowest common denominator. That is, I usually write these letters with the entire readership in mind. Today, though, that herd will be culled. Instead, I’m writing for one person in particular, and I don’t know who it is. I met a higher-level math student at Hope…

cDear Hope Nation, I’m alone in a Zoom room right now. More accurately, I’m with myself in a Zoom room right now. Most accurately, I’m sitting in a chair in my loft, waiting for people to appear in a meeting that was scheduled to begin 40 minutes ago. Because I wanted to have a smoke,…

Dear Hope Nation, Christmas has come and gone, but I’d like to share one more Christmas-related anecdote and, perhaps, although unlikely to a vanishing point, save a life. My parents were good parents, a sentence I need before I tell you about my time in a basement crawl space.  Oh, they didn’t lock me in…