The Brief Period of Coolness

When I was in the third grade, I won the grade-wide spelling bee.

The Trip South

One February when I was living in New Zealand (reminder: February is Summer in the Southern Hemisphere) I decided to go visit the South Island.

The Show Must Be Paused

Sometimes, the most patriotic, the most sympathetic, the most therapeutic thing we can do is just carry on. Tell stories. Dream dreams. Find a reason to laugh. Inject some normalcy into the world. Don’t let the enemy win by disrupting the status quo. That doesn’t work when the enemy is the status quo.

The Dream Car

Ever since I began to realize that not all cars were created equal, I’ve been a fan of the Mazda RX-7. Maybe it’s the exotic flair of its rotary engine, making it unique among sports cars. Maybe it’s the timeless, sporty but classic styling. Maybe it’s the relative rarity. I’m not sure, but the car

A Reminder, For Our Troubled Times

Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened

A Crazy(?) Two and a Half Months (May 30th, 2020)

When I first started writing in this space, my intention was to intersperse status updates along with the stories, poems, and short fictional works which are the more common fare of this site. I wrote A Crazy Two Weeks to follow through on that intention. A couple of weeks later I wrote Easter 2020, but

The Feather

F   a     l       l       l     i   n g the feather floats         gently to the ground. Vulnerable to every stray         b       r     e   e z   e it  s     p   i n   s and twirls. It seems so helpless in the w   i     n       d. The feather knows no f   e a   r. Wherever it lands it

The Racially-Charged Experience

One of my closest friends and I have a tradition which has lasted many years: we will take a Saturday, get in the car, and drive to some small town 1 – 2 hours away. We’ll walk around, see what there is to see, enjoy a local restaurant, and then head back.

The Three Nexus 5 Phones

Some years ago, I decided I needed to buy a new phone. At the time, Google had recently come out with the Nexus 5, and it seemed like a good deal at a good price point. Buying one turned out to be a more difficult proposition than I had anticipated, however.

The Downfall of the Fiesta

The very first car I bought was a 2011 Ford Fiesta. In it, Ford debuted a bit of fancy new (to them) tech: a 6-speed, dual-clutch automatic transmission. There is no way that this could possibly go wrong.