Conk’s Brain Podcast

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Is it selfish to want? Palms upturned to the sky, cover my eyes in exhaustion and despair. I clamber and claw, just trying to scale this impossible wall - is there even anyone on the other side? To create is lonely - beautiful, cathartic, revelatory, cavernous, dark, and futile. How many artists sit alone, churning out the pa...

I recently found the most comfortable underpants in the universe: excessively high waisted, super soft, very stretchy. I honestly forget I’m wearing them and would definitely not even bother with pants if I thought I wouldn’t be arrested for indecent exposure (or my butt wouldn’t freeze off in winter). So why am I telling you this? Trust that it’s not a last minute ploy for Christmas gifts. Instea...

I dream of the life I could be living, riding the ebb and flow of mountains - breathing deeply of the air and sky and sea. I dream of daffodils and tall green forests, tiny cottages in a mystical wood. I dream of having less but gaining more, of clean rooms with comfortable well worn furniture, rows of books and the flicker of candle light. I dream of silence not broken by ticking clocks, but the...

This morning, I find myself ruminating once again on the words of Charles Bukowski “We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us”. I have decided that I’m going into 2025 laughing like a madman. The world is chaos and the only thing we can control is ourselves. I am recklessly determined to find the good. Social media has been an epic clusterfuck o...

Fifteen is tempestuous, hurtling through time and space at break-neck speeds - desperately searching for anything you can cling on to. In the back of the library, Spring of 1997 to be precise, I crashed full stop into a solid anchor. Nikki Giovanni - the first poet I ever loved. She metered me to Jones beach, lyric-ed me in lilacs , taught me that poetry did not have to rhyme. It was savage, and p...

Lately, I have been singularly obsessed with Haikus. I’m not particularly adept at writing them and high school me would rather have showed up naked to class than embrace that level of constraint. Maybe it’s because turning 43 did something to my brain, or maybe it’s the impending political apocalypse - whatever the case I am mired in obsession.  No matter how much reckless abandon might soothe ou...

Chaos is truth, control is an illusion. We hold on tightly with both hands to all the things we believe we can control - fretting, worrying, twisting our insides in knots, waking up in pools of our own cold sweat certain that we can conceive every possible future, if we never sleep. But outside of us, the universe is vast unknowable in its infinite expanse. Every contingency is merely speculation,...

Lately I have been obsessed with death. Not so much the inevitability, but what comes after. I am afraid of not existing, of existing eternally some place terrible, or drifting endlessly through a deep black nothing - concious of the emptiness of it all. But we all die, don’t we. It’s the one certain thing in life. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Maybe our disconnection from nature is what’s truly a...

Does the thought of Thanksgiving fill you with warm fuzzies and joy or existential dread? I have a feeling that this holiday season is going to be an adjustment for a great many people (and by adjustment, I mean slamming full force into a brick wall without a crash helmet). After the wounds inflicted by this deeply disconcerting election, there’s a hell of a lot of door slamming and name calling m...

I know, I’m not supposed to swear. Mom says it’s not “ladylike”, but who the hell wants to be ladylike anyway? I’d rather be the bear. Oh dear, Did I just go there too? Guess I’m over zipping my lips and holding my tongue and tripping over socially awkward apologies. The news is all sharp angles and broken bottles, Molotov cocktails hurled through windows while we slept. The world has gone mad, dr...

Exhausted doesn’t even begin to cover it. My brain is so steeped in stress, I’m pretty sure it now constitutes as soup. I have ignored all of my own advice about setting limits on social media doom scrolling, going outside, and even putting on actual pants. I promised myself that I was going to be more consistent in publishing this newsletter (article on Monday and poem on Tuesday), so here I am c...

I despise the word “too”. Too loud, Too talkative, Too boisterous, Too tenacious, Too much. I don’t fit in boxes, Defy hard lines and sharp edges. I swear liberally, love fiercely, dream so big I sometimes fear I’ll explode. I hemorrhage glitter, hit ‘em with the razzle dazzle, leave chaotic sparkle in my wake. My awesome can’t be shackled by small minds wielding “too” like a weapon to put me in m...

I’m awkward, sorry, I’m awkward. All elbows and knees and oversized feet, crashing into immovable objects for lack of depth perception. I just want to make friends, connect - talk until my lips fall off about anything and everything, and nothing all at once. I wear my heart on my sleeve, hyperfixate and overshare. But the world is so big, there are so many strangers - who could be friends, who mig...

I don’t want to write this article. I’d rather curl up in the fetal position in front of my electric fireplace and listen to my compilation records from Vinyl Moon while the world burns, but here we are. As an English teacher, I taught many, many books about dystopian hellscapes (both real and fictional) and the students always asked, “why can’t we read something happier? This is all so depressing...

I stumbled on a poem that I wrote in June of 2020. It’s every bit as relevant now as it was four years ago, maybe more so. The weight of the world crashing down like a tidal wave, threatening to drown us out at sea. So many voices screaming, crying, demanding to be heard. No more silence, no more pushing it down and down and down like a good girl. No more smile pretty and close your eyes and prete...

I can’t even count the number of times in my life I’ve heard the adage “Never talk about religion or politics in polite company”. Like every family, we had a few who had strong opinions and stated them loudly (and often), but my day to day life was largely devoid of “politics”. My grandparents had a subscription to the paper which they read over coffee at the kitchen table, but my parents never di...

Time gets away from me. It just wonders off to idle pursuits consumed by the horror and splendor and joy and pain of living. It’s like being on the highway in the city at night, blurs of color created by the myriad passing cars - beautiful and disorienting. One day we are children, chasing the fireflies of summer - and then we blink. Now it’s nearly birthday number 43. There’s lose change in the s...

I have struggled epically with my desire to connect with others through writing and social media and my outright fear of internet trolls. As a high school English teacher my classroom was often a minefield of teenage angst and parental criticism. I would spend hours (sometimes days) researching and planning new lessons only to be met with “This is stupid”, “You’re stupid”, or “I hate this. Why do...

One of my absolute favorite memes goes a little something like this, “Never in the history of telling someone to calm down has anyone ever calmed down by being told to calm down”. Think about it. Really picture a situation in which you are absolutely losing your shit and think about the feelings that arise when some unsuspecting bystander ignorantly interjects, “You need to calm down”. It might fe...

Pain is temporary. Chronic pain is, well… chronic. It flows through you like a deep black river. Treading, floating, dog paddle, side stroke. The swimmer’s strength is irrelevant. Eventually you’ll be pulled under, gasping and flailing - making pleas to the universe, wondering if this will be the moment you finally drown. Be we resurface, don’t we? Determined and resolute. Perhaps this is punishme...

On this sunny 4th of July morning in the year 2024, my dogs are nervously biting their toenails as fireworks intermittently explode all around us (this will only continue in fervor and intensity as the day wears on). I feel no joy or sense of celebratory enthusiasm, but am instead battling what feels like a weeks long panic attack. In the midst of all this, I stumbled upon a quote from the self-pr...

It starts as a hum electricity buzzing beneath my skin, a surge in the back of my brain. The taste of defiance and tenacity metallic on my tongue. The words don’t have to be perfect. Why do I always get hung up on the perfection? Perhaps the act of creation itself is beautiful - messy, imperfect, non-linear but beautiful all the same. Our souls, our very deepest recesses unknowable with singular d...

Social media would have us believe that literally anyone can achieve anything they set their mind to and follow it up with a series of aspirational pictures about their now perfect lives and the explosion of delirious happiness that comes from living your dreams every single day for the rest of eternity. As much as I love the idea of cultivating positivity, this just isn’t an attainable reality fo...

I’m driving the struggle buss on fire over a cliff. In the thick of it, the cavernous abyss seems so deep and wide it’s insurmountable. An awkward, constantly clumsy dance three steps back for every one step forward. Why can’t I find my rhythm?  It’s like the universe is playing only songs I’ve never heard. The racket so loud and incongruous, it just feels wrong down to my very bones. If crying he...