The crunch was pretty loud. Oh, I didn’t know what it was, but I knew something pretty bad had happened. It was a crunch that sounded thick and noisy. I looked at my wife and asked her if she had any ideas. I thought maybe…
Two years before I joined the Army, and two-and-a-half years before Chess had gone so obviously insane that my mother had no choice but to sign the commitment papers, my father took his three kids in the family truckster over to the Ringling Museum of…
The other day I was lunching with my friend Lane when he turned to me in response to something I said and in that amused tone he acquires when he’s about to say what he thinks is profoundly obvious, remarked, “Dude, get used to the…
It was then that faculty felt obliged to take action. They organized a committee, held lengthy discussions and hearings over the virtues of following the university’s strict guidelines regarding the minimum levels and standards of digestive function. They also examined the State laws, which stipulated…
All in all, the life in the big tin can is quite sweet. Check with me on different days about this, though, because I am sometimes a little dark, dark like the Grinch, dark like Monty Clift. We have a 26″ TV with DVD and…
don’t get me wrong
I do love and financially support
the Netflix Corporation
In this excerpt from Alpha Mike Foxtrot (a novel from Paragraph Line Books), Joe Dugan, a soldier recently released from active duty as medically unfit, applies for a job at a retail store. First we walked to the back wall of the store, where a…
“A 17-year-old has been arrested in the shooting of a 13-year-old boy who was caught in crossfire Wednesday evening shortly after he stepped off a school bus. . . “ 17 years old. 13 years old. Babies. 8th grade girl’s bullet ridden body. Girlfriend of…
I’ve often told people in the East that I thought of myself as a Westerner. I love the West, I’d say. I’d tell them about going to college in Arizona, my love of the Oregon coast, and some story about smoking a cigar on a…
In this excerpt from Alpha Mike Foxtrot (a novel from Paragraph Line Books), Joe Dugan, a soldier recently released from active duty as medically unfit, settles in to life at a boarding house in a small Midwestern town. Hours lazily glided by. I stared out…
John Edwards at a podium in the Ninth Ward on January 30, 2008:
I began my presidential campaign [in New Orleans] to remind the country that we, as citizens and as a government, have a moral responsibility to each other, and what we do together matters. We must do better, if we want to live up to the great promise of this country that we all love so much.
We take a southern detour to visit my brother-in-law in a corner of Iowa. He’s taught high school for almost 25 years, and he’s my wife’s only brother. He’s a funny and brilliant guy who knows enough about history and baseball to keep you talking…
Some songs are in our DNA. I think. I was at French Quarter Fest and over the speaker came a song I knew all the lyrics to: Who Shot the Lala by Oliver Morgan. I didn’t identify the singer at the time just knew all…