“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Ray dutifully reminded himself as he watched his left shoe, and then his right shoe, pass each other on the sidewalk below, looking from his vantage point like compact autos negotiating a tiny two-lane road. If one could even call it that, given a buckling surface strewn […]
This is a story about shoes, 300 pairs give or take, and my 30-year relationship with a significant other named Amy, who lived in Kansas with her parakeet, and whom I never got a chance to meet. Amy and I were introduced to each other in the early 1970s through N.O.S.E., or the National Odd
My old friend Price Strobridge might begin like this: If the observable universe Is 13 billion years old, and I am 65, then I have been around 433 whatever comes after a billionth of the time the universe has been around. As far as the universe is concerned, I’m not even born yet. If the
Sparks from the Campfire Read More »
In John Dunning’s Booked to Die, men abuse and murder women and each other, brothers and sisters cordially loathe each other; Cliff Janeway, book-loving cop protagonist, beats his antagonist nearly to death – justifiably, of course, for the antagonist is a bully who likes to beat up women. Just another few days in America, full
The Haunted Bookshop I: Innocents at the Bookshop Read More »
Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop begins with the mysterious disappearance from the Bookshop’s shelves of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, that bringer of the reign of Christian righteousness and short hair to a people who, after a taste of perfection and a lot of death, decided they preferred neither. The book disappears, reappears, disappears,
The Haunted Bookshop II: “Christianity Fails Again” Read More »
What people do in their spare time is their business, not mine, and good for them. I don’t ask questions. I have no reason to. When the going gets too weird or annoying for me, I gamble. That’s just what I did last weekend. My job was pissing me off, and my girlfriend had been