One day (hopefully really soon) when all this is over, we’ll be compelled to go over, with friends and neighbors, lists of people we lost. Names and stories, fond remembrences. In fact, having to add these conversational stat sheets to our usually mundane observations about the weather or sports scores will become a permanent part […]
People always wonder what it would be like to move back to a place that, because of distance, practically exists only in memory. When someone actually does it, there’s got to be a story in there, right? It’s got to be fascinating to move away from a place for, say, a decade, then go back […]
When people ask me where I’m from, my answer often varies, depending on what I see in the questioner. For instance, I’ll always tell the guy with a certain accent (like the cashier at Trader Joe’s yesterday) that I’m from New York. He was jazzed, he’s from Flatbush. To younger people, all Millenials I suppose, […]
Hollywood (the district, not the ‘idea’) has some serious history. When I was a kid my sister and I left Tulsa and joined my older sister and our mother, who had been living there for a couple of years. My mom wanted to be there to simply be insinuated in the glamor, she didn’t want or need […]
It was still muggy out, even this late. Though indoors, I could roughly tell the temps outside by the flushed faces and necks of people coming into the bar. They looked a little frayed, some of them had probably been dancing over at the Pyramid Club a block away; many were NYU students. I could […]
Sometimes people say things that others find irritating, I think that’s a pretty basic truism. At times I can get pretty annoyed myself, but with me it’s not so much the content of the commentary, but rather the choice of words. And I don’t mean cursing, I’m usually on fucking board with cursing. It’s when […]
I was feeling a bit nostalgic the other day, so I did what I usually do when the pang strikes. I looked up Google Street View’s visuals of the modern versions of my nostalgic targets. Sometimes it really helps when I do this; it helps me remember more detail, especially when (as in this case) […]
When do you get to the point where you say, “Oh shit, I’m getting old!”? I mean, not the facetious attention grabbing commentary that some (like myself) have been guilty of running since the ’90’s. No, I mean the knowing deep down, the kind where maybe you don’t utter the statement so flippantly. I know now […]
I have finally done something I’ve been threatening, er, promising to do for 4 years now of compiling MoH. Right about now. And that is to write a book. It wasn’t the book I thought I’d see come out of here (that will come later in the year). This is a novel based partly on […]
I got up to go to take a shower and go to school; this was one of the rare mornings when the air wasn’t on. Our bedroom had a wall mounted air conditioner that, like all ACs I ever saw in the mid-eighties, looked like it had been installed 15 years before, back when there […]
The time has come for my 30th high school reunion down in Miami Beach. I won’t be attending, at least not at this cycle; but talk to me again in ten years; who knows? It’s not that I’m not curious; I am. A little. I am more ambivalent than anything. That feeling matches quite neatly […]
Every year I try to visit New York City, my old “home.” I’m there today in fact, preparing to retreat in typical forlorn fashion tomorrow back to my Atlanta “home.” Quotation marks are there; for what is home for someone who’s moved around as much as I have? I’ve always maintained such personal issues of self-identity […]