Cary’s archival column from FRIDAY, SEP 28, 2007 My future husband’s 38-year-old brother and his pregnant 20-year-old girlfriend: Yikes! Dear Cary, I am thrilled to be getting married this spring to a wonderful man. My fiancé proposed last winter, and we have been planning our wedding for over a year. This is a big deal for us. We started dating in 1999, and have lived together...
Walking up to the cafe on Thursday morning the day before the Mavericks surf contest down the road at Pillar Point, remembering last night’s weather news about the buoys going off along the coast, watching the big surf, and I see a guy walking up the beach with half his board under each arm. “That’s not a good sign,” I say. “I’m just glad I got to shore,”...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, I am writing to you because I feel like I have landed myself in a situation where it is impossible for me to maintain either my happiness or my integrity, and I am hoping that you will be able to give some firm yet sympathetic advice. I have often read your column when it was...
My father died. My mom has Alzheimer’s. My brother wears his trousers too high. Cary’s archival column from MAY 1, 2011 Dear Cary, I love my brother dearly. We’re 13 months apart, but I feel like he’s my twin. We survived our parents’ horrible marriage. We’ve both been very successful and have accumulated quite a bit of wealth, so we live comfy lives. I left my birth state to...
Hello Cary, I’ve been reading your columns for a year or so. In fact, it was my ex who introduced me to your column. She also introduced me to lots of other wonderful things, like the benefits of going for a walk in the woods and how therapy can be helpful to people who don’t particularly think they need it. I loved her and I do love her. She is beautiful, and she is in love...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s archival column from WEDNESDAY, JAN 4, 2012 Unemployment is making me depressed I lost my job, came back to my hometown and now I’m lost Dear Cary, I’ve been reading your column for about a year now, and really believe you might have some words of...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Classic column from November 3, 2010 I can’t stop smoking pot I love smoking pot, but I think I may have a problem. I smoke it every day, and when I can’t get it, I drink Dear Cary, I smoke marijuana every day. There are times when I don’t smoke, but I’ve definitely smoked...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, In my early twenties, I went to graduate school to study English literature. I was deeply passionate about the written word and knew from the moment that I could read that I wanted to devote my life to this pursuit. Idealistic, I felt like providence had led me to...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Classic column from Tuesday, March 14, 2006 During the blizzard, I refused to shelter my friend There were other places he could go, and I wanted to be alone with my boyfriend. Dear Cary, At 8 a.m. on Sunday, during the height of the recent snowstorm, my significant other...
Dear reader, The following column first appeared Tuesday, February 15, 2011. As always, if you would like advice, please write to [email protected]. Happy New Year! Dear Cary, I feel somewhat guilty even writing to you; you seem to have excellent insight into many people’s problems, and should you choose to answer my letter, would someone more desperately in need not have their letter...
Dear reader, If you would like advice, please write to [email protected]. And if you would like to help support this endeavor, feel free to make a donation. Dear Cary, I discovered and appreciated your thoughtful presence through reading the Sun Magazine, and since then, reading your columns in Salon. Thank you so much for your ability to see something honestly and differently...
Dear reader, Below is another archival column from Cary. He’ll be publishing a brand new column next week. As always, if you would like advice, please write to [email protected]. Happy New Year! Classic column from October 17, 2012 I’m going crazy in my job I’m anxious and insecure and paranoid and bored — but it’s such a great job! Hi Cary: Two reasons...
Dear reader, Below is another of our favorite holiday columns. And, as always, if you would like advice, please write to [email protected]. Norma and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas! Should I tell her the truth — to save her from the derision of her friends, if nothing else? Hi Cary, I will be the first to admit that this may seem like a lame problem...
Wow. I just completed my online application for health insurance in California, and I am amazed how easy and trouble-free it was. And now I can’t believe so many Republican politicians worked so hard to deny me this. As a person who survived a potentially fatal cancer in 2009, who had surgery and a long recovery, who has fought to get the care I need and was concerned after losing my job at...
Dear reader, If you would like advice, please write to [email protected]. And if you would like to help support this endeavor, feel free to make a donation. I’ve asked my family to write but they say they’re too busy. Dear Cary, Happy holidays; hope this letter finds you well. I’ve been reading your column for a long time and respect your advice, so I’m seeking some...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Hi Cary, Look, this might be a no brainer, but I’m just a product of a world with rapidly declining standards and dubious if any moral values, so here goes. I live in a major international city (A BIG ONE). Through some kind of human or machine type error I mistakenly...
Dear reader, If you would like advice, please write to [email protected]. Dear Cary, I am 30 years old and have been with my wonderful boyfriend for over a year. I really think he is the love of my life, we get along greatly, and we have projects for a life together, although everything for now is limited to words and dreams, because we haven’t the financial opportunity to marry...
What our friend Brian Herrera wrote today about his experience at the Creative Getaway at Marconi spurred some thoughts of my own which I’d like to share — with people who’ve had this experience and with people who perhaps do not know about the Amherst Writers and Artists method or the creative getaways Norma and I have put on since 2008. Actually, I have a lot to say so...
Judith Lindbloom, abstract expressionist, El Farolito on 24th Street in the Mission for lunch after the meeting, talking about William James, the God thing, William James says, Look, we are scientific men, Christian men, honest men, and we cannot deny what we see: People are having experiences; they have these experiences of another world and then they change. What are we to call this? How can...
Visiting my family gets me down Every time I see them I’m depressed for a week [button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, First, thank you for being persistent with your crazy wisdom, and for not giving up. I enjoy your column. I need a new way to think about this situation, and I’m hoping you can help...
Dear Cary, Last year, at the age of 29, I was diagnosed with a rare kind of thyroid cancer. I was halfway through graduate studies and was just about to embark on a year of research as a student, in Central Asia, where I wanted to explore a new region, do some neat environmental work, and enjoy the adventure. A quick recap: a handful of days before my plane took off from a city in North America...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Do not trust the voice in your head that says everyone else has a distorted perception of what day it is. Recognize that when your wife reminds you it’s Tuesday and that you said you would write a column on Tuesday, she thought you meant you would write a column on Tuesday...
After the Saturday workshop I settle on the couch reading The Maverick Poets, that book edited by Steve Kowit, who I was lodging next to down at the Sun Esalen thing. But the thing I love after the workshop is that feeling afterwards like we’ve all been together in this room dreaming out loud together. So then I read that poem by Bukowski about the cat, “The History of a Tough...
Books I checked out of the library and read and enjoyed in 2013: Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story. Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. Rober Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream. and Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Kind of an end-of-the-year thing. I read lots more books than that, but these stood out. (The below is verbatim from my San...
To begin without knowing how to do it: That has been my approach, and I have agonized like a man sitting in a field with many ingredients of a house laid out before him and a panicked feeling that he has begun before he is ready. He has begun without a plan. He has no blueprint. He simply got it into his head that he could dredge up many interesting things from the well and the lake and the river...
Should we go home for Christmas— even if we can’t afford it? We lost our house in Katrina. The family is scattered but gathering. Should we go? [button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, So Christmas, the so-called happiest time of the year, fast approaches, and my little family is in a tough situation...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, I’m a recovering alcoholic, married with two teenagers and a mild in-law problem that really bothers me during the holidays. To some degree, what I am struggling with is naming why my holiday situation bothers me so much. May I bend your ear? My in-laws are nice...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Hi Cary, I have a problem with my disposition. I don’t know if I can do much about it, but I would love your perspective on how to cope with it. I am a fairly normal, social, functional person. I have several very close relationships, good rapport with people at work, I am...
Yesterday in my intro to the column I mentioned “how we need to fill the January getaway,” and that apparently set off some worries, like, it won’t be cancelled, will it? Of course not. The Creative Getaway Jan. 17-20, 2014 at Marconi Conference Center is definitely happening. It’s just that some people who were hoping to make it found they couldn’t come, so there...
Dear reader, I had been thinking about forgiveness, and gratitude, and certain aspects of my own personality that are maddeningly perverse, and how boring I’ve become, and how hard it is to install a new piece of software, and how much we miss the dogs, and novelistic structure, and how we need to fill the January getaway, and the books I’m reading which I have opinions about, and how...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Reader, Well, hello there. I just feel friendly today. We’ll get to the letter in a moment. It’s down there below this note –>>. But first: I’ve been out of Salon for a good six weeks now and am adjusting to being newly independent, an...
I’m starting to think of the Rob Ford phenomenon as a rare performance-art spectacle in which the tragic and doomed performer, seeking the death of his own ego, effects a feat of topological magic in which he turns his own id inside out. Like a DayGlo 3 a.m basement tattoo of his ravaging animal being, the awful, voracious, unquenchable id of desire appears on his red, bursting skin: Will...
Dear Reader, Well, I’m in Monterey this morning, here to help some writers. Also here to write on my own. When I was writing the Since You Asked column for Salon.com, which I did for nearly 12 years, every day I wrote it I wanted to be proud. It was an extraordinary opportunity for a writer, for someone who really doesn’t know how to do much else and so has had to find jobs writing...
Dear Cary, What a delight that you are continuing. Bravo! The quality of the world dipped there for a moment, but now it is leveled up again, thank, goodness. I’ll be sure to do my part to spread the word so that everyone I know can enjoy your column. On another note, I do want to ask you a few related questions about my writing. Some background: On a deep and sweet level, I am an...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Reader, Right now I’m writing this column here on my own site on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You can bookmark to always find it. I’ll announce it on Facebook and Twitter whenever it goes up, and we’ll send out an email newsletter about it, too. Might miss a day or two...