Last summer, I received a letter from the Miss Teen Beauty Pageant. The letter informed me that I was recommended for the pageant by someone anonymous. When I first received it, I threw it aside and didn’t look at it for a few days. I wasn’t interested in being in a beauty pageant. Still, the […]
My mom likes to tell a story about a letter she received from the state of California following her decision to keep me out of the public school system when I turned six years old, electing instead to become my teacher herself. She wrote to the education department requesting specific guidelines for keeping me on
Cheating the System Read More »
The smell of a sun-warmed apricot transports me backwards in time, reliving a day spent picking fruit fresh from the tree with my great-grandmother as she regaled me with stories of living in a sod hut on the Colorado-Kansas border. Orphaned at an early age, she traveled west with her relatives, rode in a covered
Sunshine on Apricots Read More »
An air pocket of the Atlantic where sea urchins never care to go, serves drinks to mottled mammals who can never leave – unless they care to slump from suffocation. Braided, tangerine salamanders, underarms moaning with salt, peer upon aluminum bumblebees sliding along neon armadillos and mocking Echinacea crows. A lobster jockey spins otherworldly music
Golfing at the Apocalypse Read More »
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every
Aldous Huxley on the Solitude of Experience Read More »
“There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.” –from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra Parents have always worried about their kids going on dates. Mothers, like those haggy, clingy caricatures in the Old Spice commercials, suffer much anxiety at the prospect of losing their baby boy to the wiles of some teenage vixen. Meanwhile, fathers
Group Dating: A Predictable Homogeny Read More »