It will either happen today or February 14, 1958 when I am sixteen. It is ridiculous to mention even. When people in my generation haven’t been in contact for a long time, or haven’t posted to their webpage or other…
Category: Read it and Weep
Using One’s Head
When I was in 4th-turned-8th grade, I was assigned the short story “Flowers for Algernon” in English. It appeared in one of those ridiculous textbook readers of stories that always comes with grandiose seventies-style illustrations and a total excess of…
In Which I am (Again) a Blue Pyramid
Last night, Emily and I joined some of her school friends in attending a reading by noted “humorist” David Sedaris. It was kind of appalling. It should be noted that I have avoided reading Sedaris, despite recommendations from many of…
Old School
My house is a mess. My life is kind of feeling like a mess too. So much stuff. What to keep, what to discard, what to try to sell in a climate where there are no buyers. Challenges all. Piggybacking…
A Poem on the Journey Homeward (or: Something Other than Duck and Cover)
I finished a book tonight that would’ve been more fitting to finish on my last day of work and it was all I could really think about as I was walking home from the train doing one of those walking…
Midweek Roundup
Periodically, I’ll get to the point where I’m almost incapable of writing new posts because every post idea I have is an old half-cooked one from two and a half weeks ago. And at the point at which there are…
Suicide in the Sort of Present: Thoughts on the Passing of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)
David Foster Wallace was whirled into my life by my eighth girlfriend (if she can quite be called that), the one I’ve lovingly dubbed “Try Before You Buy” in the nomenclature of retrospect. It was my sophomore year in college,…
Thursday Roundup: Peace, Hope, Truth
Peace So it looks, thankfully, like the Olympic Ossetia War may be over almost as quickly as it started. If you’ve been under a rock for a week (or in Vegas, as I was for the bulk of the war),…
The Race Goes On
My job is making me a racist. I probably mean something very different by this than you might expect. Perhaps because my definition of “racism” is as much “awareness of race” as anything else. I could go into an extensive…
Storey’s Favorite Stories
I just assembled a PDF packet of my seventeen favorite short stories of all-time. Given that the short story is probably my favorite use of the written word, this was a pretty big undertaking for me. I like the benefits…