As her non-existent father figure, Gwyneth shall mourn him for what could have been rather than what was.… more
As her non-existent father figure, Gwyneth shall mourn him for what could have been rather than what was.… more
My wife says I need to give a shit. I say I never understood that expression. Who would want to be given shit? She agrees that it’s a peculiar expression, but that’s beside the point.… more
Instead of sitting in my mother’s living room, thirty-one, drunk, and jobless, I would be twenty-one, sober, and doing something responsible and worthwhile and American, like fighting in a war somewhere, and everything would look like a 1940s comic book… more
Your body is a dead and rusty brass section. French-horn shoulders and cornet forearms, tuba torso, your head a trumpet that cannot sing of how you’ve come to be this funky metal. When you speak, it’s all screeching off-pitch.… more
We die, he says. Utters that last syllable bombastically—spits it out with firework freshness, so much so that I swear I can see the concept of death colliding with his premature psyche, making its meteoric crater in the smooth terrain of his young and innocent mind.… more
What forty-three-year-old husband with a teen who just passed her written driver’s test and has only liberal arts colleges on her list to visit should be thinking about changing careers? And who is he to think any of this rumination will get him anywhere?… more
After her daughter was accepted into the top-ranked university in the country, my sister-in-law—ex-sister-in-law—took up the habit of disagreeing with me about things I wasn’t even trying to agree on.… more
“Don’t you touch that!” Dad warned. But I licked my finger and stuck it to the electric-blue bug zapper anyway. Nothing happened. He said the same about the Teflon pan on the stove, the copperhead with a bulging belly.… more
Everyone says Samson is dumb as a rock, that he’d let Delilah braid his hair and tie him to the bedpost if she asked. Everyone laughs. Everyone has thought about tying Samson to the bedpost at least once.… more