
Doing Something I Swore I’d Never Do
There is something about cooking beets that makes me impatient. It is probably some combination of the fact that A: I love them when they are Food Cooked Elsewhere; B: I don’t like them at home, and C: their…

Look! A Real Person!
I love human beings. Not necessarily individual ones, like to talk to, in person, but to watch, to admire, to experience, say, on a subway car full of them. Or to look at pictures of them, in their lives….

Waking Up From Dreams & How Chris Hedges (On War, Art, and Being a Soccer Mom) Helps me Work it Out
Part I My neighbor, Claude, committed suicide last weekend. He was in his 60’s diabetic, super bummed to be riding around in his scooter thing. I always avoided him and his wife, but T, being the friendly one in…

Salon has a winner today!
T just passed this on to me (via Facebook….grrrr…..). Wowza, Ms. Purtill! She just made it on to my women I want to talk to list. Oh, the irony of her getting all those “likes” as she writes about giving…

Is Someone Sitting in My Chair?
There was a time when I hated anyone who mentioned the New Yorker without irony. And then I graduated from Antioch, grew the hair on my head, shaved the rest, that tired old cliche of moving into the mainstream,…

Kathleen Norris (on Acedeia, Ego, and Being Sincere) Helps me Work it Out
My interview with Kathleen Norris, author of Cloister Walk, Dakota, Acedia and others, was one of the few that was not run by The Sun. It wasn’t my favorite either. However, this part about acedia and ego was interesting, I…

Am I the Only one Who Can’t Handle Facebook?
Seriously. I just can’t be. And yet…I look at the cool, interesting, happy, or maybe tortured, but in any case somehow styled, or, rather, curated, pictures strewn across my computer screen—people I once knew, people I wished I had never…

An Essay I Wrote about the Past
This essay I wrote about the past was recently posted on a groovy newish online magazine started and edited by some local writers, called The Weeklings. They did a special feature on Mad Men, and included mine. Here it…

Coupling: A Piece from Before
In addition to writing what I feel like writing, I wanted to start this blog in order to share some of the work I have done in the past that has not found its chair. This piece was recently rejected…

Food Cooked Elsewhere, and Other Longings #1
Growing up in St. Clair, Michigan was not that much fun. However, there were some great restaurants, at least (only?) to me, a kid crazy for Food Cooked Elsewhere. One place I remember was not a restaurant, per se, nor…