The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

I’ve been avoiding writing about what’s been going on in my family since Christmas because there are some things that are too fresh/painful/confusing to blog about, but, with a couple months’ worth of perspective, I think it’s time to share.

My sister Kate split up with her husband in January, and it’s been ugly. I won’t go into detail here because that would be in poor taste. I will say that I’ve been spending a lot of time in Boston, and she’s been spending a lot of time here in Newport.

It’s been hard on the whole family, and it’s been kind of paralyzing my writing. What do you write about when you can’t write about the most important shit going on in your life? Going to the grocery store?

So I’ve been Twittering a lot.

Have you ever had one of those moments in life when you feel like you’re playing a part in a TV show? I’ve had a few of them over the course of the last month. Most of us have no frame of reference for life’s most dramatic events other than drama itself.

There’s a line in the Radiohead song “The Bends” that goes, “I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen.”

No you do not. That, along with the title of Joseph Heller’s second novel, Something Happened, has been echoing around in my head since this started. Usually, when something happens, it doesn’t merely shake up the mundane, it shakes up your whole world, almost always in a bad way.

Because it takes a long time to make progress, to build something, to make things better, but it takes almost no time at all to destroy something.