The Last Temptation of Osama bin Laden We interrupt our regularly scheduled program of travel narratives to…
Jimmy Gabacho
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Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt this post for a special report: Jimmy Gabacho, a virtually unknown blogger…
In Los Cabos, we arrived at the hotel right at dusk as the groundskeepers were lighting the…
The ride to the airport across the desert sands took about thirty-five minutes. I couldn’t help but…
It came over me like a dark cloud: a wave of muck, broken tree branches, moss, liquid filth containing the putrid remains of reptiles and rodents. I was drowning, suffocated by a toxic funk. I couldn’t breathe, my throat was parched, my eyes burned, and my ears were ringing. It started off slowly and the sound grew. I figured that if I was going under, I might as well be able to do it in peace and quiet, but the sound grew louder. I still couldn’t move. I was trapped, caught up in a swamp with darkness closing in. I couldn’t move. I tossed and turned, but it was to no avail. The sound grew louder.
After weeks of gibberish, he had finally given me something juicy for my conference paper. And, let’s face it, I was intrigued. It is not every day that Chicken Man walks into your office. Sigmund Freud had his Rat Man, an old Russian guy who fantasized about a rodent crawling up his anus, and that case made his career. I was thinking book contract, movie rights, lecture tours, the works. This was heavy stuff. It was much better than the stuff I was used to hearing: “I feel guilty for what I did to my father” or “my parents didn’t love me enough.” I could spin this into an endowed chair.
After several months away from my writing, I’m finally back. I had gotten myself bogged down for a month and a half working on a paper about one of my patients. I usually don’t talk about work in these blogs, but I might as well tell the world that I am a specialist in psychoanalysis, and I do occasional work in the field. I had taken on a client: a thirty-two year old obsessive-compulsive; his condition he had been diagnosed as neurotic by half a dozen psychiatrists, and was so acute that most of them had broken off their professional relationships with him.
As I wrote in last week’s post, Peter Conners’ Growing up Dead: the Hallucinated Confessions of a…
I just finished Peter Conners’ Growing up Dead: the Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Cambridge: Dacapo Press, 2009), it’s a good read that brings back a lot of memories. It is a coming of age story about a teenager in upstate New York who decides to “flip off” his white middle-class background, forego the Game of Life, and become a modern-day gypsy, traveling from campground to campground, attending the shows of the Grateful Dead. His narrative describes traveling from show to show, sleeping in a green VW microbus, smoking copious amounts of marijuana, dropping LSD, living without the luxury of a shower, and living hand to mouth for months on end.
This post may be a little out of character, but there are things here that need to…
After I uploaded the Chris Owens post, I high-tailed it out of the country as fast as I could. I wasn’t waiting around for any midnight knock at the door. I packed the usual: shorts, t-shirts, sandals, and plenty to read. It never seems to fail: I’ll be reading a book every night for a week and right before I travel I will be close to the end, but not close enough to finish. So, invariably I end up finishing the book on plane and having to lug the book around with me for the duration of my trip. This time it happened with Ru Freeman’s novel, entitled, A Disobedient Girl, which by the way is a great read. The story takes place in Sri Lanka and revolves around the lives and loves of Latha, a strikingly beautiful servant girl, and Thara, the pampered daughter of the upper-class/caste family. Because the two girls are so close in age, at times their relationship becomes one of sisters, confidants, and dangerous liaisons, but when boys (and later men) appear on the scene, they become competition for each other. Despite their close relationship, the class/caste difference is forever an impassable obstacle.
It wasn’t long after the webmaster for the B2L2 writers’ blog in New Orleans posted a photograph…
It was the Saturday before the mayoral election in the Windy City, and my wife and I were in Chicago running errands. Once a month we make our escape from the desolate cornfields and head to the Second City for shopping, groceries and dinner. Over the years we have started to buy organic, so we always hit Whole Foods Market on North Avenue before heading for home. When we arrived, the parking lot was so jammed packed that it seemed like they were giving away food.
I was already in a pissed-off mood.