Is now friends with someone you don’t know, someone you both went to high school with, someone well respected in your shared milieu, someone you chatted with briefly at a party ten years ago, and 6 other people. Is now friends with a former coworker whom you secretly despise, the enemy of a friend, a [...]
I dreamed last night (in the middle of a long night of fighting-off-a-cold dreams) that the AWP Annual Conference & Book Fair had, over the years, come down significantly in its fortunes, and had been reduced to a very, very small gathering, not at some big urban hotel and conference center, but in the seventies-era [...]
(Catch-up post, five of five.) If this page is accurate, it’s incredibly difficult to change your name if you’re not going through the paperwork of getting married or getting divorced (and even then it’s incredibly difficult—and probably always has been, although I think it’s now even more difficult since the terrorist attacks seven years ago). [...]
There’s a lot going on in this picture Emily took at the Albany Race for the Cure way back on the first Saturday in October (where the hell does the time go? oh right, yes, we keep being ridiculously damn busy, I mean, just as a for example, who knew one lawn could collect that [...]
I have a three-ring binder next to my desk that says “blogging to do” on it. It’s full of completely fascinating and/or useless and/or totally half-baked ideas (for example: how is it possible that “CamelCase” and “midcap,” although synonymous in the senses defined on the pages I’ve just linked to, never appear anywhere together? Is [...]
We are both under the weather (or rather, she’s sick, and I’m feeling dangerously on that post-nasal-drip, wheezing, sneezing, sinus-that’s-really-a-pip verge of sick), and there’s still a million things to do, not to mention a holiday in between here and there, and I am as reluctant to write one of these notes as I usually [...]
The Frequently Asked Questions page of the Web site of the New York City Marriage Bureau offers many delights, not the least of which is the answer to the question “Can two first cousins marry?” The answer in the state of New York is “yes,” but the Office of the City Clerk takes a more [...]
I’ve neglected to mention, in the three weeks since I asked for your support, and the two weeks since the race itself, that: 1) I not only ran the whole five kilometers in the Komen NYC Race for the Cure on Sunday, September 10, but finished in time to make it to the fiction-writing class [...]
…and what I was doing, and how I got there and back, for the past week (an omnium gatherum): The Mac fired up at midnight on top of the Honda at the Thornton’s in West Virginia. Enough homemade tamales to feed an army; if everyone in the world could spend a week visiting with each [...]
Sidewalk Siamese cat. Front yard aloe vera gone mad. The smell of red dirt on the warm breeze. Falling-down shacks, glass hotels. “I’ll buy you a drink.” “What’s your name?” “Sam.” “Sam, buy me a drink. Hell, buy me a drink right now.” “How old are you?” “Twenty-one!” The line on Congress Avenue for the [...]
One of the Magnetic Poetry Kit poems I read last night at Happy Ending as my risk, which I transcribed from my refrigerator ten years ago. cool red milk a pound of finger honey one heavey cry sweat juice a rust sausage sweet beer put them beneath an incubating apparatus easy as pants
Back in May of 2003, I had the brief and glorious indignity of being Local Man—that is, a picture of my head was Photoshopped into one of someone else’s torso (and gross sweater, and kitchen, and Gene Kelly poster, etc.) for the illustration for the article “Local Man Ruins Date By Just Being Himself.” At [...]
(The original, here.) “Quick, grab the Kodak,” Wilhemena stage-whispered. “Someone’s flummoxed Bill.” Always such a busybody! But Bob’s agile mental perambulations indeed had snookered this girl’s husband under the foldable card table laid out thick with hot dish. “Cut him off,” the rude gal snorted into our hostess’s eager ear. Bill’s eyes bugged. “Oh, this [...]
Pulling the cork out slowly. What’s that funny crunching sound? Did I break it? No, no, it’s just the wrapper scraping against the cork. No wait, look, it is broken. A little corner of the lip of the bottle is pulverized. Yeah, that’s broken, I’ve got glass dust on my fingers. How the hell did [...]
So did you make it to Central Park at 8:30am yesterday? Uh, close enough. More like 9:15 or so. (Some A train troubles.) And did you finish? I did! What was your time? Christ if I know! After starting late (see above), I had to kind of rough it, running on the cobblestones and hills [...]
On September 25 I’m running again in the Komen New York City Race for the Cure. Want to support me? The easiest way to do so is to go here and make a donation electronically. A donation of $50 is the smallest of the pre-set levels, but you can make a smaller donation too. After [...]