He'd just always wanted a hearse, he said.

U.L. and I like to take Sunday drives, after dinner, each week. There's no rush to this ritual. We enjoy a long dinner with the rest of the family; we gossip, we share news (even the made-up News, an old habit we used to do when I was younger, that's found some way to stick, even to this day). What you do is, you mute the TV, you guess at what's being said by looking at the graphics, and then you tell your version. It was quite a shock, for instance, when I realized that Bush had actually been re-elected, and even greater still,...

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The monsters in my mouth.

I'm no prude, but violence in any form shocks me. (I'm rather hoping that's a universal statement). But, and here's where we may differ, my response to it is to laugh. Maybe it's a nervous habit, maybe I think it's a deflection on my part to make it less real. I don't know why I do it, but I laugh. And loudly. See, what you might not know about me is that I am the world's most foremost expert at inappropriate laughter.  It just seems easier to laugh at everything, for me.  I get tired of crying. (Though, I've done my share of that,...

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[...] losing Language and Outhouses.

I originally started this blog because I have come to recognize my, more often than not, Losing Battle with the Thousand Thoughts, something I fully intend to expound on later. But, I fought so regularly with my internal editor that I couldn't just get words on a page and leave them alone long enough to sieve through them.  The blog, I thought, would be my excuse, my Place in This Writing World, to just put things down, without theme, without intention, without resolution...sort of like brainstorming for the world to see. I felt it'd make me both accountable and more...

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January 2004: The Five-Day Cider War

I've just about decided that there's nothing that karaoke can't fix.  If it can train a Sicilian and a Southerner to live together, in harmony, then at the next G8, or G12, G+number, Summit...we need to hire Disco Dan, or Happy Butch to grab their mic stands and their CDs. I resisted this, what to me, was merely a bar-room, nocturnal, alcohol-fueled passtime, for many years. I felt that I couldn't possibly degrade myself, a real singer, I thought to myself, to such a ridiculously low-level thirst for spotlight attention. Ah, but what a little spotlight can do. With my brief second tenure in Indiana, I...

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I drank it as if it were holier than Coke.

Hold on, now. Don't think I'm crazy, entirely, but I have on three separate occasions dreamed things that have then occurred. In actual life.   The first involved a childhood pet, Scruff, who had gone to live with my grandparents at Fish Camp, a family compound surrounded my cabins, ponds, a basic swimming pool, and a torturously long vegetable garden, where we gathered each summer for a fish fry and the annual task of grading blueberries and other such fruit; several on my father's side were in the fruit farm industry; after an afternoon of grading blueberries, there is no child on...

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Persistence has no pesticide.

It all started with the handmade oatmeal soap my sister-in-law gave me, in the guise of a present.  I must say, wrapped as it was in that beautiful red gift paper, it was quite a thoughtful-looking Christmas present. That’s the allure of wrapping paper, though, isn’t it? I learned this early on:  people will take anything on this earth if you just wrap it pretty enough.  It can be a thoughtless happy, a re-gift (as American as the NRA), a genuine present, anything. Many is the household item, kitchen utensil, family portrait, that I, as a child, took and re-wrapped and gave to Nana...

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He has nothing, but looks everything.

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - Algernon, The Importance of Being Earnest

I've played him before...more than once, and yet, each time I come back to those lines, those zingers, and I think I can't do this show another time, I find something fresh, not in Algy, per se, but in what he brings to me. I think I may been Oscar Wilde. Or maybe I am. Everybody gets one insane obsession, right? I think he will be mine. So much has changed over the last few months...I suppose that happens to everyone: you think...

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