There are finished hats and scarves, stacked next to the patterns and pictures of things she constructs first in her mind.  They are joined by a sherbet colored baby blanket, stitched at night while she pretends to listen to the television, her laughter restrained and delivered on cue.  Then the lovely black throw with its beads and fringe, woven through weeks of gaping afternoons, that began as a shawl and grew to the size of a tablecloth; it rests folded in a hug across the back…

The old guitar looked like it had stories to tell. Better stories than those that had been told through it with song. Its body was chipped and faded, the grooves on its steel strings clogged with grime from dirty hands. But mine were the dirtiest, and they gripped the guitar by the neck, raised it and swung it down like a picaxe, the thin side of its body pouncing the life out of the dying dove that had been mauled by my cat, Max. I'm not a vegan, but I hate to see an animal suffer.…

All things that begin must end, and I cling to that hope every night when the nightmares and the groaning, the slapping and throwing of my belongings begin.  Please dear sweet Rosary I beg you pry the cold fingers that grip my arm every hour from my body--the cold hard fingers like chains that make me gasp and I watch people lower their eyes and walk around me like I have some kind of disease.  Providence deliver me from the cold spot in my room that lies in my bed and sinks the heat from my…

From across the room he is watching me read Natalie Goldberg's An Old Friend From Far Away. 

He is watching me spoon warm tomato bisque into my mouth and forkfuls of iceberg lettuce, cucumber, sourdough croutons with bleu cheese dressing.  I wonder if he can see Natalie's text in my eyes about a woman's vagina smelling acrid, suggesting "peat bogs that [are] insatiable." 

I picture him with his eyes closed, on top of a naked woman in a sun-drenched…

The doctor told Glen that he was probably bipolar, but not the BIG kind, just bipolar 2.

Glen said, "Wow, you're good. You've known me 10 minutes and already you have it all figured out," but he said it without sarcasm, so the shrink took it as praise, the dimwit.

"We can get you started on medication, and the sooner the better, to keep your little mood swings under control," the shrink said, reaching with a plump hand for…

In the far darkness, memory is light, and memory is dead.

And what then?

Take up your blindness and walk.

Listen to waves pounding shores.

And the roar of the cities.

And choose.

“So, this is hell?” Spencer said, looking around the somewhat desolate landscape.

“Yep, that’s my guess,” Ned replied, “though it’s not so bad once you get used to it. . . . By the way,” he continued, somewhat sheepishly, “about that little incident at Granny’s Halloween party, . . . don’t know what got into me, really, . . . no hard feeling?”

“No, no,” Spencer assured him, “I had it coming; I’d say call it even and shake on it, but I can’t seem to locate my right…

Today was a day to be heartbroken; he's back, he's with her, and not with me; and some boys just can't carry on a conversation; today was a day to be heartbroken, and then something changed.

For starters, I went about being heartbroken the wrong way: I got  my homework done early, the weather is perfect, Halloween is tomorrow, and I am listening to Thomas Cunningham. 

These are not the ingredients to a heartbroken me.

Then Big Poppa E said "I don't wanna make out with…

If you are like me, there is an ease within the state of happiness; I can tell you exactly why that euphoria, the blissful joy is with me, and I am always grateful.

When sadness intervenes, though, I want to run in the opposite direction, or I did in a previous life.

I understand our challenges and most importantly, how we manage those, the way we choose to detail them in our lives, are the lessons we all face, but I still find a deep desire to dissect the emotions, to get to…

In a BBC article published one day before my recent birthday, John Johnson wrote that our world would soon see our seventh billion person and that the earth will not be able to support life at this birth rate.  Of course, I thought of religions who poo-poo birth control and homosexuality, the only two ways I can think of to control the outrageous birth rate besides genocide, infanticide and mandatory chastity belts decorated with small electric fences.  

Johnson warned that…

Behind every great advertising pitch is some degree of a lie. 

Wrinkle creams and hair growth products come with convincing scripted testimonials delivered by paid actors with smooth faces and thick heads of hair. 

Cheap plastic toys with clever names are magnified on TV, filmed in unnaturally bright or subdued light in the hands of physically perfect children; the made-somewhere-else products are demonstrated as life-like, sometimes in mesmerizing…

The Line Ran Out the Door

"Burger King, man," God said with disgust, "I go in for some ice cream, alright, an' it musta been National Shit Food Day, somethin', because I swear to God, it's all these damn people, man, mommy an' daddy an' ten million kids, an' they're down there blowin' the mortgage or somethin' orderin' the store, an' it's Whoppers an' french fries an' Joey wants six, an' Mary wants pickles, an' Jimmy, the works, an' how 'bout a bib for Billy…

Happy Halloween, everyone. I'm running back and forth to the hospital, again. My mother-in-law is having serious problems. I didn't want ya'll to think I had forgotten you.

Hugs to everyone, and I hope you have a wonderful halloween weekend. Be…

“Well, this isn’t at all what I was expecting,” Spencer thought. In fact, he hadn’t expected to still be thinking about what he’d expected. “Strange, I kinda thought once Ned decapitated me it would be ‘lights out,’ yet here I am, dead and buried and still conscious.”

It was peaceful though – no unpleasant pain like when he was being dismembered, just that irritating itch, and wouldn’t you know it, they’d planted his arms down below his legs.

“Wonder when I lose consciousness.…

He stared at the pitcher’s hands, and as he gripped the bat, he thought of her wrists and their slender compliance; he knew she was behind him, watching with hope.  He stared at the pitcher, and crouched to swing; it made his legs feel taut, and he thought of them resting between hers.  His lower back felt tired, and there was a little twinge in his groin.  He watched the pitcher prepare to wind up, and he breathed a shallow sigh – as it was all he had time for – and recalled her arms around…

"Take Methuselah," God said, "he really did live all them 969 years, like all them dudes in Genesis, man: Adam, Enoch, Noah, and so forth, they all topped out at 900-plus, except Abel, you know, who got offed, an' Cain who did it, an' God only knows what happened to him; probably got eaten by saber-tooth tigers or somethin' an--anyway, man, like I said, these dudes lived a long fuckin' time.

"So okay, Methuselah, dude looks like he's never kickin' the…

The student’s paper was a simple, 500-word narrative essay about the day somebody lost something important.

“Darius,” I say, “don’t just say ‘he went to the store’ when you could use more descriptive words like hurried or slouched or ambled,” and I mimic different ways of walking as my student looks on,…

Ned was bored.

Vengeance is hard work, after all, and frankly he was a bit out of shape after lying in the ground for the past year. Wielding that ax he’d found conveniently on the front porch had taken a lot out of him, and once he’d caught up with all the latest family gossip, he was feeling somewhat out of place among the living. Oh, everyone was polite enough, but Ned sensed they were a bit disconcerted with his appearance – or maybe it was that foul odor that seemed to be…