Entries 273

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I’m conflicted about the role I’ve fallen into in, as a lore-keeper for all my home-town’s darkest open secrets, the things that everyone knows if they were there at the time, but sound absolute...

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That common phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day” is literally-true as far as the literal truth goes, but the beginning is only one part of a story, and the other half of that truism is that Rome ...

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Joan Henry was a stylus-driving lass, every day still-driven to creating her art. It wasn’t so much she did it for passion, though drawing certainly was her passion, the issue was she’d literall...

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Sitting in the audience of a poetry reading by a handful of brilliant folk, at my tender age of 45, I finally realize something I couldn’t put into concrete word until that very moment and so I’...

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The worst thing about being dead other than not being alive, of course, is the way that absolutely nothing changes. Everything changes for you, sure, you’re no longer corporeal, no longer able t...

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On the eighth day, God rested again. And on the ninth and the tenth and the thirtieth day and the three hundredth, God continued to rest. Finally, one morning God said ‘we’ll call this Boredom!’...

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“Hello everyone,” the middle-aged man rose to stand behind the particleboard podium, in front of a disused chalkboard, in the most obscure room of a church’s basement, “my name’s Joe and I’m a r...

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It really is all your fault, y’know. The horrible state of the world, the fire and ice, the floods, the earthquakes. The rising tide of fascism, the collapse of nations, the existence of that ‘r...

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I own a laser-disc of 1962’s ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ which starred Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury. My brother Dan bought it for me as a gift and I love it. Now, this isn’t because I’m any ...

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One of the more interesting holiday traditions to come forth in recent years is “The Polar Express Christmas Train Ride”, where tourist rail services redress one of their leaf-peeping trains wit...

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Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a lot of things which is fine. Leonard was a poet long before he sang, Cohen appreciated the value of ambiguity. When people leave wanting more, constructing thei...

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Having a national symbol is a wonderful thing, in concept. Something inspiring and unifying to rally around. In practice, it usually comes up short as any country is too varied and fractious for...

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(sometimes, I write the same idea twice in two forms, in parallel, to see how they manifest differently) Have you ever noticed how the names of skin conditions if they weren’t actually diseases...

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One of the more overlooked difficulties with the structure of American culture is the way we lay out our holidays. Folks act like holidays are inviolate pillars of historical and societal consta...

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I was a very different person when I was a child. I mean, I hope we all change over our lives. It’d be a profoundly boring thing if we all remained constant through this entire befuddling journe...

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Dorothy, Wendy and Alice, so different on the surface but so very much the same at the end of the day. Each of these lost girls three thrust into worlds beyond their young reckoning, beyond imagi...

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It was the most exciting day of Charlie Bucket’s life. Of course it was. Growing up poor as dirt, barely having his own surname’s sake to relieve himself in, winning The Golden Ticket contest fro...

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The bad news is there are no happy endings in this life, as nothing really ever ends at all. You might get sick or might get healthy, might get married or divorced, still as long as you draw bre...

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One day, Rose awoke to discover she could suddenly be two places at once. Literally, two places at once. She could copy herself over to live out her lives twice at a time. She was never sure why ...

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My father played the piano like it was his actual voice, not the crude low grumble erupting from his throat, constantly code-switching and dumbing down his impressively self-taught vocabulary so ...

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Working in a library is, at its essence, a daily battle with the universal force of Entropy. I mean, sure, every other job is as well, just living is temporary defeat of physics’ tendency to degr...

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The worst part about being functionally-immortal is watching people you loved age to death and places you cherished crumble to dust, sure. That sort of trauma never erases your humanity, soul or ...

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The mythological creature as tourism hook is hardly new, of course. Shysters have been selling crude plesiosaur carvings at Loch Ness in Scotland since the 500s, before the word “plesiosaur” was ...

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The sailor indeed said “Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be… but my life, my love and my lady is the sea”. That much is entirely accurate, but you gotta understand, that’s a...

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“Your son is a wonderful writer for his age,” Miss Sobiecki told my parents or at least something approximate to that through thirtyish years of gauzy memory, “but that doesn’t mean I can read a ...

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