Entries 299

Page 1 of 12

As the dutiful oldest daughter of an impoverished family, Maria took up the burden of helping with finances, by sneaking across the border to work on the farms of California, sending back everyt...

---

There, on his death-bed, surrounded by his closest followers and assistants, the bishop looked out his window into the starry night-sky and wondered how much longer he’d have there, wondered if ...

---

The Hedonic Treadmill is real. The more empty-pleasures you chase, the more empty-pleasures you’re gonna need and the more it’s going to hurt when you can’t get another even larger empty pleasur...

---

You could’ve cut the tension in their council chambers with a knife. Not some ordinary knife. A cold iron blade, a sword with a silvered edge, a weapon otherwise blessed or cursed to exploit a n...

---

The good news was they had finally, in earnest, begun to wrestle with the scientific challenges of breaking our reliance on fossil fuel, for once and for all. Better news yet was that they did i...

---

Objectivity’s a comforting and convenient lie. There’s no such thing, of course? Everything we do or see is shaped by the context of the moment and the perspectives of the participants, but it f...

---

You were born with a little lump of coal inside your chest, so was I. So was everyone. You know, metaphorically? But it doesn’t stay that way. What life does to you and what you’ve chosen to do ...

---

There are almost always two of me inside my head. I don’t mean that in a Jekyll-and-Hyde way or a split-personality way or even in a multiverse kind of a way, it’s far more mundane than any of t...

---

If you truly love something, or someone, you can’t just pretend the downsides away. If you only remember the good things, are you really remembering anything at all? Everything’s contextual. Not...

---

Growing up dealing with what I suppose you’d call “mild-to-moderate” obsessive-compulsive disorder was a hell of a thing. You might never think that’s what I contend with, if you saw the unorgan...

---

I don’t know that I necessarily believe any conspiracy theories, but God knows that I appreciate them. I love conspiracy theories for the way that they illuminate how people look at their world....

---

One morning, after a night of troubled dreams about not gathering enough discarded sucrose for the queen, Procurement Drone Delta-Theta-81171 woke up in a big pile of fluffy things that she some...

---

She thought she just had a type. Not a physical-type but a personality-type. Aloof but impulsive. Free-spirited on the surface but deeply-guarded on the inside. She always wanted to save people ...

---

In the beginning, the internet was a tool to see the parts of the world you couldn’t see from where you were sitting, behind a giant desktop tower with a 28.8-modem chirping at you as it fired u...

---

“No.” I admitted to her, without shame but without pride, either, “If I were that smooth, I’d have three of you.” I’m honest to a fault most of the time, admitting to my weakness and giving othe...

---

When the light left the star in the sky you gazed up at last night, dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. The beam that left their sun that eve, as you stared at its distant echoing, will arrive h...

---

There’s more than enough here for everyone. Nine billion or so human beings on this blue-green clod, and exponentially more resources than we could ever need, provided we could more or less shar...

---

Damnedest thing George Bailey ever saw. He’d been considering suicide atop the only bridge in town, tiny compared to what he could’ve built as the world-famous architect he dreamt of being, but ...

---

Most creatives secretly wish they were also brilliant at some other form they’re terrible at, which frustrates them, suffusing their works with myriad references to those other mediums. How ofte...

---

David Arquette still owes me for dry-cleaning. He doesn’t know he does, of course, I never met the actor best known for “Scream” and having multifarious siblings and exes more notable than himse...

---

The knife is still in you. Metaphorically, the knife is still in your side, it has been for years and decades now. You have gotten used to it. To the extent that one can heal with a blade lodged...

---

So, do you want your good news or bad news first? Of course, you’ll want the good news first. You always want the good news first. You always think that the good news will give you paths toward ...

---

I’ve been trying to grow my fingernails out again, for what feels like the ten-thousandth time in my forty-something decades on this rock, and I’m certain that I’m going to fail once again but I...

---

I’ve written before on the topic of my favorite curse word, ‘goddamned’. The way that its treated as a milder curse, a PG-13 cuss, yet is a way of saying ‘I want the Thing in charge of every-thi...

---

“Jeannie’s Dream Motel” hadn’t always been called that. Who knew how long it’d been there, on a lonely country road through farmlands between Richfield Springs and West Winfield, but she’d no do...

---