I am sitting alone in the insect-humming dark of the back porch, stars stranded high above, satellites blinking past, drinking wine that isn’t helping. Because. Because, because, because, because, because … Because some days it’s like you’re standing all at once naked in the high roadside weeds, one thumb up and the other hand down, …
So on this day in 2007, a petite, ceaselessly silly, impossibly dear woman, who regards the worst puns as the best humor; who claims scatological rhymes as high poetry; who mocks the singer-songwriter greats of the 1960s-’70s as whiny and verbose; who thinks beer should be fizzy and yellow and, honestly, flavor-optional; who believes “coffee” …
So today my fabulous old man would have been 87. Salud, Pops. Salud. His was a life of dogged perseverance, launched into a chaotic world, 1932, the final child in a family of 10, to dirt-poor immigrant parents who died early, from grueling sweatshop work and, in my grandfather’s case, from general hard living that …
Hey, 2019, how’s about not being a fucking bastard, huh? Because after these past couple of humdinger years, I seriously don’t trust any of you any longer to get it right.
It is, once more, that most magical time of the year. Time for network television to again broadcast one of the most wildly effed up TV movies to ever pass itself off as family holiday entertainment. Rudolph. The non-reindeer deer with the bleating lightbulb for a nose. Every holiday season, Lisa and I tune in, …
So, to sum up: Thanksgiving, small family gathering, lovely, Luke home, talked to Taylor on the phone and heard Ellie coo, my mom settling into the noise and change of our busy house and smiling often, at the food, the love-insistent cats, the pie, oh the pie, happy, happy, whee! Because among those things I …
Trying to put my hands on these photos all day yesterday; now, as a new today is upon us, I find them, not at all where I remembered them to be. I’m not sure there’s not something awfully appropriate in that. So above is my old man as a young man, career Army, visiting family …
The English language has failed me, again. Because, you see, I am sick. And tired. I do not want to be something so wretchedly mundane. Not sick, and tired. Seriously, either sick or tired would be more than enough. But. I am sick, yes, a nasty little summer-cold bug has for several days made me …
Hurt and disillusioned, I’m giving up and just going the hell on to bed. I have sat quietly here for the past hour or so, straining for any hint of the brash martial sounds heralding the first engagements in our Second Civil War out there within the great American night, as has been loudly predicted …
I have my particular issues with life, as we all do. A constant for me: Why does doing the right thing so often feel like doing exactly the opposite? I got home from this afternoon’s ill-advised sick-Frank walk in the wilting heat, and was stumbling and coughing and post-nasal-dripping my way through putting up the …