There’s an R.E.M. song called The One I Love that I never liked because it’s simple, repetitive, and boring. It starts off as a love song, a dedication to a former lover: This one goes out to the one I loveThis one goes out to the one I’ve left behind But in the next line…
My Dearest M.
I found this today while going through old notebooks and journals of mine. I’m retyping it here in case it gets lost or destroyed. Paper is so unreliable. I wrote this on the airplane two days after you were born, when I was on my way to see you and hold you and breathe the…
My Creed
Back when I was still a practicing Catholic, I was really into the Apostles. I had many questions about them. Who were these guys? Where did they come from? How were they chosen? Why were they chosen? Why did Jesus decide to give these particular men a rose on ‘A Very Special Episode of The…
Spock & Kirk
How do we make decisions in life? The big ones. The ones that tell us which direction to go when we hit a crossroads. The ones that impact us for years afterwards. How do we live with those decisions and deal with the consequences if they don’t work out right away, or if they don’t…
Photophile
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”– Dorothea Lange “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”– Joan Miro When I was 9 or 10,…
Hey There
Hey now. It’s been a while. Almost a year, in fact. Where the heck have I been? What have I been doing? Not writing creatively, that’s apparent. Let’s see…. The shortest answer is the most boring one: I’ve been working a lot more, focusing on generating as much income for myself as possible while it’s…
Escape From Facebook
It didn’t happen overnight. The thought had been fermenting in my mind for a long time. Seeds were planted during heated political arguments I’ve had with friends of mine over the past 10 years. Arguments that got out of control and became personal. I lost a good friend to one of them. We’re still connected…
20 Years Later
Today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. The sky is as blue as it was that morning, the sun is shining as brightly, and there’s a nice breeze passing by that portends the arrival of fall. I was 33 years old on 9/11. Now I’m 53. 33 feels like a lifetime ago. 9/11 feels like…
Surviving COVID
No, I don’t have COVID. To my knowledge, I’ve never had it, although there’s a part of me that wonders if that month-long “cold” that knocked me on my ass and gave me conjunctivitis at the end of 2019 was really COVID. I’ll never know. At this point, I’m one of the fortunate people who…
Notorious RBG and The American Politburo
When I studied Marxism and socialism as a Poli Sci major in college, I came to admire some of the ideals of those philosophies, as unattainable as they seemed: elimination of economic inequality, feeding everyone, trading in some individualism for the collective benefit of the greater good. You know, like Spock said to Kirk in…