So there I was, stranded along a quiet country road littered with smashed cut-flowers, beneath a darkening sky, beside a field full of foraging cows. Later that same day, a twitchy kid would stick a loaded semiautomatic rifle in my face. I’ve determined just now, via a quick consult with Google, which was not yet …
My name is Frank, and I’m a registered Democrat. And I need support; we all do, if we you are part of the increasingly diminishing collective that’s still in this awful boat with me. Because lately, identifying in any way as a Democrat is as much to my shame as anything. I have voted almost …
Several days ago, I determined it long past time to go through the stray bins of my old newspaper and magazine clips and throw out the stuff I never liked, and eliminate all the many duplicates, and then shove the remaining assortment into a single box, back again into the back of a closet, to …
I used to be one profoundly angry guy, eternally pissed-off, hair-trigger to explosion, and like that, a trait that, increasingly through the years, has, well, outraged me, even if … Because let me very quickly qualify, I am not violent, nor have I ever really been, toward others, and not otherwise abusive either, certainly never …
The great, the late … When I was just newly a teenager, my older sister Michele’s next-door neighbor friend Lori kindly loaned me a bunch of albums, stuff she thought maybe I’d be into. Much of it I didn’t go for, and still don’t, like REO Speedwagon, which was way too treacly sweet for my …
Y’know how the most mundane of things can drop you smack-dab in the middle of the most poignant of memories? No? Well, get to be my own sparkling young age, and trust me, you will. For now, let us begin: With a text received just the other day, from an insurance company. Not some business …
<Illustration by Tel Aviv artist Yuval Robichek> I don’t usually post two days in a row. Yesterday’s somber deconstruction of conflicting raw emotions demanded from today, however, some little upswell of positivity, at the very least. As did I, as well. This aims itself in that direction. I hope it comes close to hitting its …
Wounded-crow handoff to wildlife rehabber. I didn’t expect this to get to me like it did. Too often, I find myself uttering those very words. Yet, live and learn, that’s what they say we’re supposed to do. At least that’s what I’m led to understand it says in the manual on being human, if anyone …
You think it can’t happen to you. We all think that, out of hopeful denial, perhaps, that we ourselves will be spared the impossible horror of it. Then one day, you, like so many other poor souls before you, glance outside one disarmingly sunny afternoon, maybe while fixing yourself a cup of burnt coffee or …
I’ve never shared a link to one of my own pages of past newspaper writing here as its own blog post however, the response in just the couple of days since I originally added this almost-30-year-old story to this site, and then mentioned it on social media, has been kind of amazing. It really seemed …