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I worry I’m nothing but a totem-pole of affectations, standing atop each other, in a trench-coat. Human-shaped at distance, but the closer you get, the more obvious it is I’m just an exaggeration...

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In a different life, and I mean in a very different life, the tale of his turn-around might have been inspirational, a small-but-touching arc from failure to redemption. One afternoon, he woke up...

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It wasn’t so much he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, we all do that time-to-time. It was which wrong side he awoke upon. He didn’t wake up on the right side or the left, he somehow woke up ...

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I cannot speculate as to whether Robert Johnson had a deal with The Devil. Those extraordinary successes and spectacular failures who die young certainly seem to have done as such but there’s a d...

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The funny thing about Christmas is, even though it’s supposed to be joyous, its most popular stories are about regret. Whether you’re personally marking Christ’s birth or lamp oils, winter solsti...

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Sure, Paul claimed they were simply having a wonderful Christmastime, but the facts just did not add up. I didn’t care he was a Beatle, that he was Sir Paul McCartney, that the man claiming this ...

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They’ve lived up there, in those hills, behind their high walls, behind their reinforcements, for as long as anyone can remember. The armed patrols at their periphery, the armored truck deliverie...

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It used to mean something to be pretty-good at something. It really did. To be a three-sport high school star, a county beauty queen, to be in the best band in your valley. It often meant a life ...

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She wouldn’t mind it so much, if it wasn’t for the damn birds. Some would call it a blessing, she came to know it as a curse, but all in all, it wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the birds. Sh...

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“So, why is everyone on here always hitting the pound key?” “What do you mean by that,” she’d known teaching her mother how to use Twitter would be difficult, she hadn’t known it’d be quite this ...

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“You can’t beat the devil by a nose,” the old man said, on the stoop where he sat every night for years, at least since I’d moved into the neighborhood, “that’s not how it works. If it’s even clo...

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My library gig and my love of baseball have one thing in common: they both bring my childhood back around when I least expect it. Explaining our local quartz exhibit by producing a “diamond” my f...

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Most technological advances become routine after a decade or two. It’s a quirk of our incredibly short lives. It needs to work like that for people to not go crazy. The wheel or radio, the intern...

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We must’ve looked like idiots up there in the Thruway overpass, shadows cast against those long nights and the longer highway beneath us and we probably were. Indistinct shapes pumping arms at sp...

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In the beginning, there was a light. A brilliant light. A hot searing light. An endless light. This light illuminated all, that all was everything. Everything was already there and that everythin...

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I minored in religion at college, this much can be agreed on, it says so in Syracuse University’s archives. This is at least a fact. Not a seminarian thing, of course, world religions, comparativ...

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The family dog Ollie is thirteen or fourteen, hard to know with rescues, and at this point in life is almost totally blind. It doesn’t get him down, other than doggiebetes, he’s hale and hearty f...

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My favorite parable isn’t Christian actually, it’s Buddhist or, anyway, Buddish. It could be from any faith with a monastic tradition but as I remember, it was told in Buddhist terms. I believe m...

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Sir Gladhand had surely seen the world and, as he watched, the world had just as surely passed him by. He was a hero a dozen times over for whatever that mattered but lately it didn’t feel as tho...

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“It’s a fool-proof plan,” she told her, “it’s a fool-proof plan and you know it. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” Her sister looked at her askance, a brief silence punctuated by rifle exchan...

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In a flash, you can bridge the impossibly-vast chasm between the lonely islands of two human minds, forging a connection there like a welder with a burst from their hot torch. BRZZPT. The connect...

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what an honor is to not die young and pretty, what a privilege it is to instead just wind down, simply wear out. How often it is a person doesn’t get to experience ...

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“What happened to my powers?” The intrusive thought sped through her mind from time to time. She had no idea where it could’ve come from, but each and every time, she pushed it down and away beca...

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The good news is that your last nervous breakdown could be your very last nervous breakdown. The bad news is that there’s a couple of different ways that scenario could actually unfold, good or i...

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We want to go to the stars. The movies make it look easy, the television makes it look easy, little blinking lights, press a few then liftoff, there you are. The fantasy is understandable but I w...

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