He had integrity, always. He could be sly and mischievous, and he had a sizable ego, and he could drive you crazy, coming round on deadline day to rehearse his topic for Donnybrook at length. But he came round to all of us because he wanted all angles, all opinions. By the time he wrote or spoke on air, he sounded sure and strong, because he had researched and read and listened all week.
“Honey, you look sick without it,” my mom informed teenage me. Gentle and loving, she was hardly ever that harsh. But she was caught in the cult of femininity, and she wanted to make damned sure her daughter understood the need for artifice.
I would like to say…
I ask chatbots for recipes and gardening advice. Bash Ahmed, a brilliant friend who works in IT, has long exploratory discussions about politics, culture, and finance. When he commented—after the president’s message to “Open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards—Praise be to Allah”—that we were living in Dr. Strangelove,…
Geometry needs to be part of the zeitgeist.
The impulse is to think that someone who makes plans for something else also helps bring it about. That fantasy does not seem to be doing us much good as a body politic, but the idea has taken root everywhere, including at Department of State.
Five years. That allotment sounds like a breather, but in fact is not. The plastic jug of GaviLyte is the bell that tolls for me, and also perhaps for thee.
A solid old brick house on Clayton Road with a sign outside: Living Insights Center. A meeting place, maybe, some kind of recovery program? I step inside. In the first room to the right, a lifesize statue of St. Therese of Lisieux gazes at an illuminated Qur’an, a silver…
You know how in family obituaries they sometimes single someone out as a “special aunt,” or “special cousin” or “special nephew”? I had that kind of special relationship with a dog one time, a dog I dogsat down to her very last day. It is this feeling of wanting to remember Nala dog that has me telling dog tales today.
Fragmented sleep might not be restful, but I love it, because I can finally remember what I dreamt. The stories play like movies, colors saturated, plots full of twists. Some are spun from trivia; others are Hitchcockian, suspenseful and complex. Who writes these scripts? Who does that weird and…
I found the book in a box in a storage locker just as I was writing a recent piece about a murderer. The amazing thing, the admirable thing, is that William Steig channeled his deep feeling into art over a very long life. The murder stayed in his dreams.