“If you don’t like what this country is doing, you can always leave!” You’ve probably heard this line before. It’s become a popular refrain among conservatives, and was even said by Donald Trump this week in one of his tweet storms. The idea that everyone should fall in line or just leave the country if […]
Words From The Other Side
The Thing About Envy
“Few people have the natural strength to honor a friend’s success without envy.” — Aeschylus I wish I could be a lot of things I’m not. One of those is a person who doesn’t envy. After all, envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, not to mention it can make you a truly incorrigible […]
Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It
I’ve wanted tattoos since I fell in love with a biker on the Tilt-A-Whirl when I was about eight years old. My first was a disaster. Meant to be a moon lady inside the sun, it looked like a hairy eyeball. When I got around to covering it up, the artist, Joseph Dunmire, talked me […]
The Thing About (My) Drinking
Sometimes it seems like alcohol has always been a part of my life, though really, I didn’t have my first drink until age nine. It was whiskey. Rotgut. Straight out of the bottle. And it was my mother’s idea. In the summers, to make money to buy school clothes or anything else our parents couldn’t […]
Coming Out for Pride Month
June is Pride Month. It’s a time of remembrance, community, and celebration for the LGBTQ community. Often, it’s a time where people are inspired by the parades and rainbows to finally muster up the courage to come out as part of the LGBTQ community. While I could never really speak to every feeling and every […]
Hold the Press! And other Adventures in News Reporting
My very first semester in college, I was offered an internship at a daily newspaper. I turned it down, rather piously as I recall. I was majoring in English, not journalism. I was going to be a fiction writer. Why would I want to write daily news? Ironically, ten or so years after turning down […]
