“It’s been a difficult year for all of us,” I said to the Tennessee National Guard sergeant. “I’m not going to say what my political views are,” I continued, “but regardless of the blame, it’s been a hard year for all Americans.” We dallied there, he and I, waiting for the fifteen minutes that the…
Dear Christopher, Your mother asked me to write you postcards as I travel. She plans to give you geography lessons to enrich what they already have taught you in elementary school. I have written these. In addition to the history and geography of San Diego, the Imperial Valley, the Algodones Sand Dunes, the Colorado River,…
Headquarters Coffee wouldn’t take any of my shit. They had a sign up that said “Our plumbing is over 100 years old. If you have to go #2, don’t use our toilet. Our pipes can’t handle your pipes.” I had to take a shit really badly because I just drank coffee, and coffee makes me…
This morning, I’m thinking again about what I’d do if I had no need to earn money. It’s easy to give a fanciful answer involving charter jets, mansions, luxury goods, or endless cruise ship vacations. It’s easy to make some equally unlikely scenario involving sainthood: opening a homeless shelter or volunteering to save the rainforest.
My parents suddenly appeared in San Francisco one weekend in January 2006 with a desperate plea that I become more involved in their lives as my dad expected to die from cancer within the year. My residence in Sodom-by-the-Sea, so far away from them, had not been an accident, but rather where I ended up…
There is a lovely road that leads out of Nashville and into the hills. Before the hills, there are suburbs all the way to Murfreesboro. Then there is a place in Manchester where they’ve widened the road to accommodate the yearly music festival there. The road climbs about thirty miles to Monteagle: from there, if…
Nobody actually asks these questions of me, but I wish they would. That’s what an Internet FAQ is. No one actually has ever previously asked the questions that have been compiled into a FAQ. The FAQ is merely a compilation of the desired conversational topics of the person compiling the list of questions. It’s an…
What was that woman’s name? She saw me at her job at the sandwich shop in Asheville, and later told me that she had been so turned on that she went into the bathroom and masturbated, thinking of me. I didn’t pay it much mind, but that might have been the first time that I…
