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“You may be able to hold your liquor,” the bartender said, “but your liquor isn’t ever gonna hold you. Might hold you back, I don’t know, that might be me undercutting my own business model, but ...

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“Clearly,” the lecturer pointed at the projection of the photograph, “it was a holy site for peoples’ of its time, though the fact there seems to have been two competing groups with differing rit...

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Everyone wants the easy way out and I’m no different. I have a ticket for tonight’s lottery, even though the odds are six-hundred-million-to-one. Someone has to win eventually, why not throw two ...

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If you’ve ever seen someone who isn’t American try our chocolate for the first time, you might be surprised to find they say it tastes like puke and truth is that they’re right. The standard form...

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“Gimmie the real stuff,” the old man said each and every time he ate there, “not the fake crap they gave us in ‘Nam.” Whenever he was in that diner, he ordered the pancakes and eggs and whenever ...

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“The Hands that touched the Hands” is the Catholic tradition that fascinates me most. The idea the mandate for their clergy, from pope to parish priest, is derived from an unbroken chain of conta...

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My generation didn’t ask for those participation trophies, you know. That’s the thing the stories get wrong, we didn’t want an awards ceremony for next-to-last-place in the youth soccer league. W...

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She stared at him in disbelief, which is to say she stared at her boyfriend in Disbelief, Nevada. Disbelief, named as such since no one believed its founder’s claims he was building a shining cit...

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Your failure saved the world, you know. Yes, you. The one reading this. This message has been distributed publicly so you won’t end up targeted, like shortwave broadcasts available anywhere but d...

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They say the place is thief-proof and that’s fair, it probably is, at least for certain definitions of “thief”. Even if you’re the greatest thief alive, as some say of me, which is also fair, I p...

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Autumn sneaks up and pounces like lightning, like a starved lion looking to fangoriously devour a gazelle caught unawares, one moment you’re daintily lapping at some idyllic pond, the next is all...

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Pete Best never got the chance to be full-on “Beatles” famous, he never got to be one of the four coolest dudes in the world for a handful of years, never chased by mobs of screaming girls, eithe...

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We can’t say, with any modicum of certainty, that prominent talk show host Rachel Ray has ever dined upon a human being’s flesh. That would be patently absurd to state, of course. Absolutely unp...

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Casinos have no clocks upon their walls, casinos have no windows at all, ugly carpets forever force us to look up at pretty blinking lights demanding we press our luck. It isn’t accidental, libra...

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When I was a young boy, the only thing I found interesting about my hometown was that we had an affiliated minor-league baseball team, the smallest city to have one. The lowest affiliate of the N...

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For a while before the COVID times, I worked in the one fancy-style coffeehouse within a wide radius, in a small farm-town along the Mohawk. I wasn’t great at the beautiful latte art part of it b...

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Our neighbor Walter seemed born-old to me, of course, because I was three when I met him. He lived with his father who may as well have been Methuselah, gnomic, Yoda-like, smoking a pipe on that ...

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Sophie would wander out, sometimes, to the holler in the countryside at the edge of town. It was the kind of place the old folks spoke of fondly, where she and her friends had run wild when they ...

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It could be better, it could be worse for Jemma Taylor, M.F.A. While most of her old grad-school comrades slave away as untenured adjunct professors, she fell into writing a gimmicky series of pa...

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The word is not the thing, of course, Korzybski, but the hope is that the word can at least gesture toward it. We use our words like B.B. pellets at a carnival shooting range, where one could nev...

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You must understand, I felt like a failure. Disappointed and lonely, didn’t know what to do. I’d accomplished all these things, made all these things but all I could feel was anxious emptiness. I...

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They say “necessity is the mother of invention”, and while that’s often true, it omits the part where necessity often also skips right past intention, how so many of our great leaps forward devel...

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At first, they were just thankful that there were no casualties and minimal injuries, all aboard able to walk away from the plane crash, probably due to the fact that sand dunes are far more forg...

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A lie’s just a story that won’t admit that it’s a story. A worst kind of story, an anti-story. I know for stories, they’re the only thing I’m any good at. Here we are within an age of lies, of do...

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The cliché is “Rome wasn’t built in a day” but what that chestnut neglects to say is that Rome didn’t fall in just one day, either. At its height, it’d become so vast and all-encompassing that th...

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