[I introduced you to my new co-blogger, a gargoyle named (well, his name is pronounced this way) Flange, just the other day. In this, his inaugural post, Flange wanted to give you some idea how he got where he is, i.e., as a professional gargoyle. When and if needed, I'll interject brief commentary and/or supply [...]

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When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)
For instance, a story (told, and [...]

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[This is the next installment in what appears to be a series of ongoing posts about my experiences with ears, hearing aids, and hearing in general. If you missed the earlier bits, feel free to backtrack to Part 2 (on hearing aids); there's a link there to the first part.]
While preparing to write this post, [...]

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The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)
But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.
I [...]

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(1) Me — during work hours. Just came up for a breath of air.

(2) It’s me again. Actually working! See, I told you so!

(3) Here I am still working. I don’t know how I can work so hard!!

The above photos (taken somewhere in France, sometime in 1944), their captions penned in ink on the back, [...]

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If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta [...]

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[This is the first in a series of every-now-and-then posts about popular songs with long lives.]
Some great songs go through subtle changes over time: the original lyrics are updated to correspond to more modern diction and taste; rhymes get improved or dropped altogether; refrains are added and subtracted; and of course new arrangements can, with [...]

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A series of professional and personal disappointments. A young man on the brink of his 30s. No idea where his life is bound — forward, over the precipice? or backward, over that one? — or what he’ll find once he gets there. A motorcycle.
The details of the disappointments aren’t important. (Once you reach a certain [...]

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[Today's post is my contribution to travel writer Angela Nickerson's Blogapalooza blog party. The theme of Angela's Halloween Blogapalooza is "What a Strange Trip It's Been," for which her instructions are:
...put a photo of a pumpkin at the top of your post and tell us the story of your strangest or scariest trip ever.
Be sure [...]

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When I was a kid, the family habit was to stop on the way home from church at the L&M Bakery. (I’m so happy to see they’re* still in business and still getting rave reviews.) For the six of us, a reasonable guess might be that we’d get, say, a dozen doughnuts and be happy, [...]

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