This weekend, while on a peaceful hike in Shenandoah, I saw another hiker scrambling back up the path, eyes wide. He slowed down when he saw me, and explained in a breathless North Carolina accent, “Bear! There’s a bear just around the bend. I’m not kidding!”
Why do you have a middle name if you never use it?
Displaced Aggression League Report — Week 1
Greetings Team Owners, and many apologies for the delayed report in this, our opening week. Blame the bull skunk that left your League Manager blinded by unholy stink, as collateral damage in its 3am showdown with the League Dog. It was a horrifying turn of events that necessitated a hasty evacuation of the Command Bunker until the situation could be contained. But scientists tell us that, just like the start our football season, the sudden influx of these toxic rodents in urban areas is a sure sign that Fall is here and Summer is a distant memory.
Indeed, it’s hard to believe that, just a few weeks ago, many of us were still in family vacation mode: With personality conflicts sharpened by rolling blackouts and a maddening heat index, and in-laws forced to take shelter on shady porches in resentful groups. We draped ourselves over sticky wicker furniture and struggled to suck oxygen out of the steamy air, while the relentless screaming of cicadas was punctuated by the thumping of fat black flies the size of sparrows, trying to force their way through the screens to drink our blood. It was too hot to do anything – too hot, thankfully, for any of us to act on the paranoid and murderous impulses that skittered around our brains every time we glanced at each other.
I first met her on my way home from work. I was walking down the sidewalk; she was showing off her belly. She knew how to get a guy’s attention. I greeted her by stroking her chin and rubbing that belly. But I had someone…
People are always telling me how great it must be to live in the country and how they’d trade places with me in a second. Uh-huh. I grew up in Mississippi, and I’ve lived in Texas (twice in Dallas, briefly in Austin), Washington, D.C., and…
Back in Dallas, I was into my “all hotels are the same in the dark when you are asleep” rant. This has never had any effect on my wife. To me, it’s better to sleep cheap. The hotels she picks are disgustingly over-priced restaurants where…
before you were born
the years stretched into the past
it was a world without you
Please go here to read part 1 of my interview with Joseph Crachiola. It sounds like for most of your life you’ve identified primarily as a photographer rather than as a musician, or am I misreading that? Well, I don’t know. Photography was my…
He sat for the longest time staring blankly into the distance. Finally he saw that there was a way forward. As simple as he was, this insight was astonishing. It had all seemed so difficult and clouded. Now he could barely understand how he had…
Joseph Crachiola is from a small town outside Detroit that got swallowed up by the suburbs (same story for me, except replace Detroit with Chicago). He worked 15 years for suburban Detroit newspapers and 22 years as a corporate photographer before he got bought out and decided to move to New Orleans about 2 years ago. He recently served as road manager for the Pinettes Brass Band in Turkey, and photographed the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy.
My gift was rapped in pink paper and Leah’s was too. The others got green or blue. I can’t remember what color they got but it was not pink. Will you be surprised to know they were boys? I wouldn’t. I wanted the green I really did.