Essay: Wishing and Burning and Quitting and Starting

Just go to sleep, I think. Nothing left for you tonight but a late start tomorrow. It is 1:26 AM on my mother’s birthday, and it is another night in North Texas with temperatures below freezing. As it is February, that may not seem like remarkable, but it has been a cold new year so


If I Am A Stranger

Come, let us renew ourselves here, with each other. Normally we sit on shelves and deny that we are brothers because there’s no money in it. The best way to know who you are these days, the key is to look to others, so that you can learn a little about you. If I am


Holiday Vignettes 3: IV – Brothers

I was lucky this year to see my brother at Christmas. He’s been in Oregon for years now with his lovely wife Sarah and snow dog Clancy. As we’ve gotten older I have come to think we look less and less alike. I have never felt that we shared much of a physical resemblance: My


Holiday Vignettes 3: III – Twitter

We all had Christmas on Twitter this year – now, at the holidays, instead of not thinking of you (and, as a result, relegating you to non-holiday status, forcing you to exist only in the ether of memory between when I can see you and when I cannot) instead now I know how you feel


Holiday Vignettes 3: II

In my father’s house: there is no escape from The Fart Game


Holiday Vignettes 3: I – Boston

Sound is a hammer and memories are stone, and this city is an anvil where the writer sits, and days pass as glammer while revisions are honed; We all pay the bill but who receives the benefit? (to whom we cede the benefit)


No Surprises, or How I Was Almost Arrested While Covering a College Republicans Convention

After a few minutes, during which I’ve started going over my questions, a state trooper throws open the door, hand on the butt of his gun, and asks me in a too-loud voice to explain what I’m doing here.

“I’m the working press,” I say, “and I’m covering this convention.”