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We’d been waiting on it for weeks: my uncle’s yearly request for a Christmas tree. He’s a virtual shut-in due to mental illnesses, has lived on the third floor of my grandparents’ house nearly-fi...

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Michael Cecconi of Little Falls, forty-four, shuffled off his mortal coil Monday December 4th, tumbling down three flights of stairs in a Victorian McMansion converted into a library while attemp...

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While most can find a few traditions they enjoy associated with the American secular winterish holidays, the truth of it is that even the holliest or jolliest of us also have a few Yuletide custo...

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I’ve taken two driving tests in my life and passed both by the exact minimum. A slim point each time. At twenty-two, just out of school, I barely scraped through the New York exam. I couldn’t aff...

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I was sitting at the High-Catholic funeral for the grandfather of two of my oldest dearest friends, thinking how much he would’ve appreciated the rituals. The singing, the incense, all the milita...

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When I was just a teen, back in the Nineties, video stores shadowed the firmaments, swarmed in great thundering waves, much as the buffalo teemed the American prairie before Columbus came along a...

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There’ll be kids dressed as Pokémon, all around on Halloween, their moms dressed-up as the sex bombs they rarely ever get to be. Toilet paper hastily festooned from the trees, once rare as hen’s ...

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In most ways, it’s best to be diminished like this. Insubstantial. Little-known, even to academics. No worshippers at all. The height of godly powers, gorging on your adulations and supplications...

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“Look,” the administrator said, sitting in the desk hovering above him, her authoritative pantsuit brought neatly together by a slender purple neck-tie, “you came to us well-regarded, MXY-944.” “...

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I’m often disturbed by the knowledge the internet provides me with about the worst parts of the sickest human brains. Reddit basement-incels apparently waste their life-times dreaming of the Roma...

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We’ll cut to the chase: we’re sorry to inform you that you’re dead. You’ve been dead for a while now. We’re not certain how long exactly but we’d love your assistance in figuring that out. Once y...

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I wasn’t trying to acquire my one-and-only no-doubt concussion, but if something seems once-in-a-lifetime, I lurch into its wake and see what happens. My existence is mostly long stretches of dul...

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I had always kind of thought the Herkimer Pizza-Hut would manage to survive the heat-death of the universe. Cock-a-roaches and tardigrades collecting Personal Pan Pizzas from the Parents As Readi...

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Consider the cautionary tale of two early humans, Thogg Grainsmasher and Chudd Stuffowner. Thogg’s family’s tradition of pulverizing grain for bread with a stone club went back beyond all tribal...

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My secret is that my borderline-obsequious over-abundance of humility is a defense mechanism. Not self-defense, mind you, it’s there to protect everyone else. When I was a child, I was greedy and...

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Nothing quite like the dog days of summer to make one feel like the most rotund piece of flotsam and/or jetsam in the sea, depending whether one was abandoned to the briny deep accidentally or on...

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“It ends with us,” she said, “I do not know what to do with that.” “Of course it ends with us,” I replied, “we’re closing shift today.” “No,” Jess laughed, “the novel It Ends with Us, the Colleen...

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To say I’m not a morning person is an understatement, understatement so profound as to border on absurdity. Saying I am not an early morning person would be like saying Tom Cruise is only overcom...

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She was on her supervisor’s bad side and she knew it. The exact cause at that particular time was a mystery but, when you’re spending a literal eternity in Hell, there’s a long list of things it ...

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I don’t think she meant anything cruel when she said it, I had little doubt toward her sincerity. “You should run for Alderman,” she said as I left the booth, “your grandfather and dad were both...

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In 2025, CERN’s Hadron Supercollider team announced they’d invented a machine to observe a person’s parallel timelines. I couldn’t say how, something-something string theory, anything past interm...

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Folks are huge on the concept of The Memory Palace, these days. It isn’t anything new, some earliest version goes back to proto-Greek philosophizers who believed if you wrote everything down, you...

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Elaine was not a happy medium. It’d been a long time since she’d been happy if she’d ever been happy at all. She’d been miserable for years, from long before her recent situation, running from th...

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The notion of a wild-life refuge is wonderful, of course. Humans have managed to really bung up large swaths of this planet, chasing slips of paper that don’t mean anything outside the context of...

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Long before you were even born, when he was barely a teenager himself, your father stumbled simultaneously into the best and worst luck in human history. There was a group of older toughs harassi...

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