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.
One of my local libraries has a great used-book store. I stop by about once a month and I always find a must-have title or two. My latest haul included the September 1949 Bantam Books first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, for…
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As I wrote in last week’s post, Peter Conners’ Growing up Dead: the Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Cambridge: Dacapo Press, 2009), brought back a lot of memories. But not all of them were good ones. If the bad memories are missing from the…
We’ve all heard that the struggle in Wisconsin continues – now with a challenged judicial restraining order, and efforts to recall Republican legislators underway all over the state. For what it’s worth, I had intended to continue posting small Wisconsin roundups but was repeatedly overtaken by events – and by events, I mostly mean the assault on what’s left of the American labor movement that has now spread to many other states, including Illinois.
I’ve been working on a short story this week (and doing lots of spring farm chores, like garden prep and cutting grass), so the following will be brief. I’m hoping Esquire will not sue me for ripping off their format. I steal with love, guys.
JOHN HICKS
PILGRIM AND WAYFARER, 49, TUSCUMBIA, ALABAMA
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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.
I often cut through the North Bridge Mall on Michigan Avenue to get to the Grand subway station on my way home from work — especially when I want to avoid the weather. It’s a straight shot that takes me over Rush Street through Nordstrom…
One of my good friends is the international marketing director for a California winery. He met his wife during one his frequent visits to Japan.
This post may be a little out of character, but there are things here that need to be said. It is regarding one of these projects I work on in my other life as a blunted academic, teaching an endless line of adolescents who think…
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cross-posted at The G Bitch Spot Times-Picayune/nola.com, Artist colony at Colton school to disband; Matt Damon to help relocate rooftop garden, June 10, 2009. T-P/nola.com, KIPP charter school’s tentative hold on Colton school site is challenged, January 18, 2011. And see the comments on this post, January 19, 2011….