Adjust text size:
ADMIN: Weekend Peregrinations
I’m going to be away from the computer on any reliable basis for a few days — probably for the last time in what feels in retrospect like a very scrambled 2011. You know how careless my attendance (let alone participation) has been for the last few months at your blog, whoever you are? Yeah. More [...]
Catless
Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years. We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. But not the same sort of sadness as to find it suddenly so… Katie lived longer than the other two indoor cats we had — somewhere around [...]
Midweek Music Break: Warren Zevon
In a music-rich culture, how do you decide what (and whom) to listen to in the first place? And what keeps you listening to it, over time? My kid brother and I have had this pervasive and often subconscious back-and-forth influence on each other ever since he arrived on the scene. (Well, that first year [...]
Midweek Music Break: The Fleetwoods
The Fleetwoods were one of those groups more successful than one-hit wonders — they had several hits — but they never quite broke through into super-stardom, either. They seemed to be here, and then not-here.* The group seems to have formed almost by accident: In one version, high-school students Gretchen Christopher and her friend Barbara [...]
Perfect Moments: Two Beautiful Women, a Certain Amount of Booze, and Maybe I’ve Got a Story…!
In the mid-1990s, boy, was I ever confused, perplexed, and probably (by many measures) in need of adjustment. Especially about my writing. Here’s what my quote-unquote oeuvre consisted of then: A non-fiction Op Ed memoir(ish) piece in a regional edition of the New York Times. A published mystery. (Depending on who I was talking to at [...]
Perfect Moments: “I Shot ‘im, Paw.”
The house in which The Missus and I live now is over twenty years old, as is our immediate neighborhood. But the area in general has only recently started to get built up. Real honest-to-gods wildlife, not yet squeezed out by housing and new roads, can still be spotted here and there — foxes, a [...]
Midweek Music Break: Haunting Songs
I noticed a few months back that The Missus and I have a favorite way to describe certain music. Haunting, one of us will say, and the other will nod. A very haunting sound. Haunting lyrics, aren’t they? And so on. The ingredients which go into making a song haunting, vs. all the other ways it [...]
Real-Life Dialogue: Wardrobe Culling Edition
[The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. He has stayed home from work on this day to prepare a guest bedroom for painting. In this guest bedroom is a closet, and in the closet are His clothes. All of them. Woven shirts, knit shirts, jeans, suits, ties, socks, underwear, shoes... It's not a [...]
On the “A” Word
[Image: "Left-Hand Rule." For an explanation about something other than the subject of this post, see this page at the University of Maryland's Department of Physics site.] …or: what It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has to do with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Well, no, not really. The post started out to connect [...]
Victims of Fashion (Men’s Department)
Someone, no doubt, has taken a census of active bloggers and other social-media types, focusing on gender. I don’t know what the breakdown might be; maybe I’m stereotyping at least one sex, if not both, but I would not be surprised to learn that more women than men contribute to the ebb and flow of [...]
