There is a downside to allowing your world to grow small, but it’s not what you think it is. You can maintain a limited existence even while searching far and wide. You can explore the world while living inside a prison cell that measures eight inches across from ear to ear. You can find yourself alone, surrounded by people, or overwhelmed by stimuli, sitting still in the dark. I myself am a romantic. But not a hopeless one, and it is hope that has turned out to be the problem for me...
When we are young, we look forward to holidays with unbridled excitement because they are so full of possibility. But as we age, we turn our attention to the past, to memories of a life already spent. We wax poetic about ancient meals, and conversations with people no longer living. We remember the good times. But memory, like time itself, is a relative thing. Memory is a peculiar aspect of human existence. We constantly remember things that didn’t happen, forget the things that really...
When you buy a ticket to the circus, you expect to see some crazy shit, but what you don’t expect is for the circus to burst into your living room and start getting it on right in front of you. There is nothing that can prepare you for the shock of watching a clown go down on your mother-in-law, or for the lion tamer to stick his head in your uncle’s mouth while your cousin reads passages from Atlas Shrugged out loud. As a wise woman once said on the six o’clock news, “Ain’t nobody got time for...
I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to a point where I think I look better unclothed than I do clothed. For all intents and purposes that ship has sailed and probably didn’t set off anytime recently either. It was probably somewhere around my mid-twenties and even then I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it myself although I do seem to remember a coterie of willing companions who must have been. Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.Joseph Roux But it’s not just about being physically or...
Autumn is a smell: woodsmoke, decaying leaves and cinnamon. It’s a color palette too: oranges, reds and browns. The color of the earth on fire. The air has an entirely different quality with a crisp snap in your nose and the way the low light glows now rather than shimmers, the sun never getting so very high. The tastes are no longer the green bite of spring shoots, or the sugary sweetness of summer corn, but the savory, earthy, more subtle flavors of mushrooms, root vegetables and gourds...
It’s a story that’s been told and told again in our family. I think we tell it because it so accurately reflects who we are as a people in a way that trying to describe our little clan could never do. It’s a symbol of our love, arrogance, ego and empathy, all rolled into one. My Aunt Opal was at the Department store with her daughter. There were in the shoe department, buying new shoes, which is always a big occasion, but which I imagine was an even bigger deal back then. This would have been...
THE MODERN ARTIST IS WORKING AND EXPRESSING AN INNER WORLD—IN OTHER WORDS—EXPRESSING THE ENERGY, THE MOTION, AND OTHER INNER FORCES.Jackson Pollock
“Jazz is rhythm and meaning.”Henri Matisse The French painter Henri Matisse once said, “I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” This is how I feel when I try to understand jazz, and to be clear, I do not understand jazz. This is not to say I don’t appreciate it, I just don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. I am forced to play catchup the entire time, because I can’t quite predict where it’s going to go. So if jazz could be described as the place...
It has taken me the better part of half a century to learn that I am not a good public speaker. This is not due to a fear of getting on stage, or speaking to large groups of people, but a realization that my mind does not like to perform in real time. I am not a performer of any kind, and despite my abiding love for standup comedy, and the secret fantasy that I might have it in me to perform in this manner, I am not that guy. “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good...
My issue with authority began at an early age. I realized early on that adults were not only infallible, but often incompetent as well. This can be a scary thing to learn as a child I suppose, but I was not deterred. I just assumed I would need to do it myself, and so proceeded to do just that, throughout my entire life. My parents had given me a solid foundation for exploration, where I understood the ground rules and believed their authority to be legitimate. They were not capricious...
Writer | Journalist | Storyteller
