Tuesday, February 9, 2010
I’ve been getting some dislike mail about the grammatical structure of my posts, or that I’m sounding less coherent, and while I never found the need to defend my extemporaneous writings before, I probably should say that my entries are unpolished intentionally. I’m in the throes of a ten-step recovery program for writers who haven’t [...]
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My blog gets approximately fifty hits a day, which qualifies it as a personal journal, for the most part. The people who read it are people who care about me, people who dislike me and want to see if I talk about them (You (plural) know who you are.), and those who are interested in [...]
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Saturday, January 30, 2010
I was just browsing in my local Borders, but only because it was there. Borders is by far the most inferior of the book chains on and off the web. There’s no stock, their prices are too high for an alleged big book chain, and they brew terrible coffee. In my browsings, I came across [...]
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Thursday, January 28, 2010
When people like J.D. Salinger die, we’re not necessarily distraught over the loss as if it were a person particularly close to us. I think our sometimes inexplicable grief is a reaction to the thought that another piece has broken off the foundation of our frame of reference. Even in his isolation, a refusal to [...]
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The truth is that I always thought it would be cool to be a brooding, isolated person who was misunderstood by everyone. There may have been times in my teens and early twenties when I actually practiced this artifice on people with the convenience of being able to revert to my happiness.
I had a very [...]
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Saturday, January 16, 2010
It’s difficult for me to admit I’m getting older, or to accept it with any kind of grace. I have always been like this, though, especially with respect to my writing. The easiest way not to get anything done as a writer is to pick your favorite writer, figure out how old he was when [...]
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Friday, December 11, 2009
When I was a kid we built snowmen, and the one I remember most, for some reason, is one my father helped us build during the blizzard of 1978. I’m assuming it was during this time, but maybe I’m compressing every snowstorm into the memory of the big one in 1978, when we could have [...]
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Monday, November 16, 2009
…so what seemed like fourteen kids board the bus, howling. People in the front seats scatter like there’s been a cockroach infestation. Kids take the seats, surround an older woman who scolds them. Their mother, pushing a stroller — a two seater — boards the bus behind them.
– Just sit down. I don’t want you [...]
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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The things that scare me most are about routines, redundancies, traditions: waking up the same time every morning, the same bus stop and same route.
There was a handsome Asian man preparing his coffee next to me, and he smelled sour. Sour doesn’t quite describe it correctly, but it was a marrying of cologne and his [...]
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Saturday, August 22, 2009
Part of the enjoyment of being a teacher of English is that you will read books you never would have considered picking up in the bookstore. I had to read a series of books for an American Experience class I’m teaching, and strangely, both dealt with the African-American experience: Kindred, by Octavia Butler and Passing, [...]
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