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“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...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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“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...

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I’m conflicted about the role I’ve fallen into in, as a lore-keeper for all my home-town’s darkest open secrets, the things that everyone knows if they were there at the time, but sound absolute...

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That common phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day” is literally-true as far as the literal truth goes, but the beginning is only one part of a story, and the other half of that truism is that Rome ...

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Joan Henry was a stylus-driving lass, every day still-driven to creating her art. It wasn’t so much she did it for passion, though drawing certainly was her passion, the issue was she’d literall...

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Sitting in the audience of a poetry reading by a handful of brilliant folk, at my tender age of 45, I finally realize something I couldn’t put into concrete word until that very moment and so I’...

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The worst thing about being dead other than not being alive, of course, is the way that absolutely nothing changes. Everything changes for you, sure, you’re no longer corporeal, no longer able t...

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On the eighth day, God rested again. And on the ninth and the tenth and the thirtieth day and the three hundredth, God continued to rest. Finally, one morning God said ‘we’ll call this Boredom!’...

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There is something oddly fascinating about cultural notions that only made sense in one small window of the zeitgeist, surviving beyond their usefulness, treated normally outta sheer social mome...

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“Hello everyone,” the middle-aged man rose to stand behind the particleboard podium, in front of a disused chalkboard, in the most obscure room of a church’s basement, “my name’s Joe and I’m a r...

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It really is all your fault, y’know. The horrible state of the world, the fire and ice, the floods, the earthquakes. The rising tide of fascism, the collapse of nations, the existence of that ‘r...

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I own a laser-disc of 1962’s ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ which starred Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury. My brother Dan bought it for me as a gift and I love it. Now, this isn’t because I’m any ...

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One of the more interesting holiday traditions to come forth in recent years is “The Polar Express Christmas Train Ride”, where tourist rail services redress one of their leaf-peeping trains wit...

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Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a lot of things which is fine. Leonard was a poet long before he sang, Cohen appreciated the value of ambiguity. When people leave wanting more, constructing thei...

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Having a national symbol is a wonderful thing, in concept. Something inspiring and unifying to rally around. In practice, it usually comes up short as any country is too varied and fractious for...

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(sometimes, I write the same idea twice in two forms, in parallel, to see how they manifest differently) Have you ever noticed how the names of skin conditions if they weren’t actually diseases...

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