a weighty issue

I didn’t mean to get fat. No one ever means to get fat. One year I was working out every day, at my goal weight, feeling healthy…

this year

I am going to make it through this year
if it kills me
- mountain goats

There’s still four months left in the year and I’m ready to usher it out. It hasn’t been a particularly bad year for me personally, in fact things have been…

on faith

here’s the church
here’s the steeple
open the door
and see all the people

A Long, Strange Trip: The Grateful Dead and the Road to Self Discovery

then/now

It was 65 degrees in December, unusual for a Long Island winter day. I was trying to take a picture for our Christmas card and she insisted on…

twelve

It was the August I was turning twelve. This was long ago and twelve back then was still all innocence and naivety, still a year in which you were considered a child. Children today are just little adults; they’ve been handed a weighty world fraught with worries, about the future, about being gunned down in their…

Lucy

Lucy at one time was soft and pink and perfect. She’s now a dingy gray, dirtied and ragged from being dragged around playgrounds, baseball fields and…

of summers past

My neighbor is mowing his lawn at 7am. I’m not bothered. The sound reminds me of things: stepping barefoot onto a newly mowed…

the end is the beginning

I wrote a novel.

I wrote a novel and I took a screenshot of the words “the end” and saved it for posterity.

I wrote a novel and finished it in 2015 and this is 2019 so for four years it’s just been sitting there in a folder on my…

empathy and ideology

It was 1970, maybe ’71. I was eight or nine. We were sitting in my mother’s 64 Impala convertible — roof down — in the parking lot of Modell’s Supermarket looking for my cousin Frances The crowd of teenagers gathered in the lot was thick, and they were setting off smoke bombs, making it hard…