SARASOTA,FL-
Though my confessions shall end in neither sainthood nor bestseller lists, I now come to my personal vampire. He survives the sun and crucifixes. I’m Hungarian and so is my Bela Lugosi. I call him OCD, but it’s the first initial by which I know him best. (more…)
BAKERSFIELD, CA-
I didn’t know there were going to be robots.
I stood on top of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I had just sat in a red metal pod with Brenda Knight. “There’s going to be pods,” she said. She was right. There was also a swimming pool. A girl slipped into it, glided through the water. Buildings crowded all around. The U.S. Bank Tower with its thousand lit windows looked like it could grow feet, step over the Standard and run into the ocean. (more…)
CHESTERTOWN, MD-
The sun is shining.
Clear and deeply blue skies are filled with canada geese on their annual pilgrimage to Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Blue crabs are at the azimuth of their season. Beautiful and full.
Jeans, t-shirts, and flip flops are the fashion of this glorious season.
LOS ANGELES-
Chardonnay. The wine of bridal showers and bad office parties. White wine. The house white. Buttery tasting. Super-oaky. Hints of vanilla. Gives you a headache. If you’re a guy, and you drink it, you’re sort of a pussy.
Overkill.
Over-served.
And yet: The Chardonnay grape is the most widely-planted grape in the world. It is also America’s best-selling white wine, big and brassy, offering a wide range of flavors, from buttery oak to the crisper, more tart and acidic varieties.
I’m not a huge Chardonnay fan, generally speaking. More specifically: I’m not a huge fan of California Chardonnays. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
Why? Too buttery-tasting. Too rich. Too big. Too woody. Too sweet.
HOUSTON, TX-
I have a long history of becoming far too invested in my prime time TV shows. For a period, I went around telling friends and associates in various states of legal trouble that “a writ of mandamus must be issued” or that “these things usually sort themselves out in voir dire,” along with other bits of unsolicited, erroneous legal advice mined from “Law & Order” episodes. I employed, usually to little effect, modern forensic techniques learned on “CSI: Las Vegas” to create a time-line for those moments spurred on by my late-night roistering. I know I went to Taco Bell late-night because there are beans on my face this morning. But wait. Perhaps I am confusing correlation with causation. I’ll need more grant money to close the book on that case. But this is different. I’ve got a big problem now. The folks over at FOX have really done it to me this time.
SARASOTA, FL-
When I first heard the words “bipolar,” I figured the shrink thought I lived on the North and South Poles. That may sound like bullshit, but I also wonder whether there really is any such thing as bipolar, except in the most obvious cases (you wake up and dress like Hitler, making speeches in town square, which no longer exists).
I just don’t know. Rapid cycling? I don’t ride a bicycle. Doesn’t everybody have rapid mood changes? Listenting to grocery story music can send me into a mini-depression during the length of one Elton John song. Sorry has to be the hardest word? No, “You’re a billionaire with the world’s worst wig” is not a word, but it’s much sorrier, and to pare it down to the analogy, I’m sure “wig” would do the trick for you. (more…)
TULSA, OK-
I remember quite clearly, when I was 10 or so, a television commercial for Tylenol. The message went something like this:
“Extra Strength Tylenol has more pain-relieving medicine than Regular Strength Bayer Aspirin.”
I was only 10 years old. I shouldn’t have even been paying attention to the commercials. I should have been playing with my Rubik’s cube while I waited for Magnum, P.I. to come back on. But that commercial pissed me off.
How can they think people would be that stupid? I wondered. Any human being with half a brain isn’t going to be fooled by a statement so clearly misleading.
It turns out people are not only susceptible to misleading marketing, they seem to be drawn to it. Unsubstantiated superlatives appeal to our inner nature. But what nature is that, exactly?
GULF BREEZE, FL-
What the hell happened to Ben Stein, can someone please tell me??
Didn’t he used to be smart??
Nah, I guess he only played a smart guy on TV.
BAKERSFIELD, CA-
How many people do you know go to bed at night and wake up to an alarm clock? Of these people, how many, including yourself, have woken to the equivalent of roller coasters zooming through ears? Is this something you like? Is it a routine? Are you hung over everyday? Tell me, why are people turning these alarms up so loud? Are you innocent in the matter? Are people’s alarm clocks troubling you? Are they, or you, difficult risers, heavy sleepers, sedated drug users, loud-noise addicts, alcoholics, insomniacs or closet water-boarders who have to torture everyone even while sleeping?
UNITED KINGDOM-
It’s that time of year again: there’s a chill in the air, the sun barely shows its face, and the leaves are just golden memories long since carried away by the wind. A great time, in fact, to recall some of the outstanding non-fiction books that have landed on my desk this year. (more…)
LOS ANGELES, CA-
There’s the old Mahatma Gandhi quote: “You must be the change that you want to see in the world.”
You see it on bumper stickers. You see it on peace signs. It seems simple enough, but naturally, it’s harder than it sounds.
It can be difficult, for instance, to determine exactly what changes to make in the first place. It can be hard to know where to begin.
LOS ANGELES, CA-
The word Uranus.
Here are a few things I know about it.
First, it’s a noun.
SANDY, UT-
In Tommaso Landolfi’s epistolary story “Pastoral,” a society girl who’s run out of money moves to the country one summer.
UNITED KINGDOM-
In the 1920s and 30s, Morris “Moe” Berg was a Major League Baseball player. He started out with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1923 and finished in 1939 with the Boston Red Sox. Despite the length of his career, by all accounts he was nothing special as a baseball player. (more…)
PHILADELPHIA, PA-
This post is about as tasteful as bedazzling a pair of acid wash jeans with pink rhinestones.
This is a post about boobs. Specifically, my boobs.
I’m on good terms with the girls, for the most part. Obviously, we go way back. They’re there for me.
Our relationship is changing though, and that has given me cause for concern.
Overall though, I happen to adore them.
I realize the rule is you are only allowed to adore your boobs if you bought them from the right surgeon and even then, you are only allowed to adore them if they aren’t resting on your collarbones or as wall-eyed as an inbred walrus.
LOS ANGELES, CA-
I was just reading about a woman named Henrietta Lacks.
Odds are, you’ve never heard of her before.
She was born in 1920, into a family of tobacco pickers, and died in 1951.
Her maiden name was Pleasant.
Henrietta Pleasant.
She died of cervical cancer.
She was originally from Roanoke, Virginia.
African-American.
The descendant of slaves.
She married a guy named David Lacks who worked in the Sparrow’s Point shipyards; they had five children in rapid succession and lived on New Pittsburgh Avenue in Baltimore. (more…)
LOS ANGELES, CA-
So I was listening to the news on NPR a while back. A story about something called excited delirium. It’s a medical condition. A diagnosis. It has a long history, but finding a consensus definition for it is a difficult task. The condition can be fatal. Symptoms seem to include extreme agitation, wild incoherence, and violent behavior. And controversy is currently brewing as to whether or not it actually exists.
The argument is playing out in courtrooms across the country, and also in the realm of public debate.
Doctors, lawyers, cops.
Weapons manufacturers and political operatives.
Investigative journalists.
And so on. (more…)
UNITED KINGDOM-
A few days ago I went on a walk with my partner through the water meadows not far from our home. It was a beautiful day, one of the few in recent months when it didn’t rain. We let the course of the river guide our feet. The water beside us was as clear as crystal. Fish flickered among the green weeds.
UNITED KINGDOM-
“Look, Dimitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb?”
It’s a classic moment in movie history: President Merkin Muffley (aka Peter Sellers) has just called the Soviet Premier on the telephone to tell him that in the next hour, 34 US bombers will each drop 40 megatons of H-bombs onto his country. As the Premier delivers a withering blast of Marxist-Leninist abuse down the phone line, Muffley looks pained: “Well, how do you think I feel about this?”
BEIJING, CHINA-
Dear Sir or Ma’am:
I am writing to you today in response to the letter you published in your issue of February 22nd of this year (Volume 356 — Number 
from one Oronte Churm of Inner Station, in which said person states, “It’s come to my attention that some members of my community object to the term ‘double-enders,’ which I used recently to describe a vicious bout of simultaneous explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting. I was simply being discreet, but one would never know it from the looks I got from Ms. Nipple, the schoolmarm; Mr. Reacharound, the parson; and Major Waste, who is fresh back from the war.
