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 […]
nonfiction
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 […]
The Thing About Wonder
“Hope springs from that which is right in front of us, which surprises us, and seems to work.” —Anne Lamott The thing about wonder, or rather our sense of wonder, is we usually start to lose it right around the time we’re shedding the last of our baby teeth. A few of us don’t, […]
Moonlight Through the Pines
I always ignored the small things in life, pursued what I believed was philosophically relevant. Then a week ago, I had a major surgery. As I write this, there’s a small chance it could be cancer. I could still need further treatment. Doctors removed a mass as big as a newborn baby. Despite the small […]
Nature, Walk With Me
Talk to a friend if you’re feeling depressed, they say. Eat well, get enough sleep. Take a walk in nature. The closest I get to nature these days is in a nearby office park with some nice landscaping. I walk early in the morning, when the parking lot is empty. It’s mercifully quiet—once I get […]
