Earlier, having mastered two exceptional new words, I declared to my wife, who has professed her love for me at times, that I was brewing a cup of ante-jentacular tea in an effort to jump-start personal anabiosis. She barely glanced at me, walking instead into the other room and sitting down in front of the …
These last few days, and my own hometown’s appalling part in them, have battered my spirit into an ugly husk of itself, a balloon of despair inflated within a leathery suit of nerve-aching skin. I am not being merely melodramatic, as can certainly be my way; my beloved country’s slippery slope down into blind idiotic …
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 …