I have no family of note. My dad was an only child of parents who didn’t keep in touch with their siblings, who also had almost no children. My mother; a more convoluted but similar story. Anyway, they all died and I got generations of papers to store in my garage. I found this…
Flight. Feel danger or pain approaching and retreat. Unless you’re evolutionary defective. Then you just lean right on into that pain. It’s a compulsion. Nearly out of my control. I feel it in my gut, a force tugging me from my center, off my feet and into the sharp end of whatever bad situation points at me. Especially…
Older ladies, who still color and set their hair and know how to email, sure they’re fine. Whatever. But the Bills of the world, they do something to me. Cowboy shirt, faded, not worn ironically. Khaki shorts showing the white scars of his knee surgeries, and clean white socks pulled up the calf. Straw…
Every summer I sit in the damp heat of the glassed in “Parent Aquarium” at the University’s pool and watch my daughter learn to swim. This year, as I was signing her up at the Fitness Center, I couldn’t stop looking at their rock wall. Brand new, forty feet high, weird little pockets and pinches…
My husband had this terrifying maniac of a friend years ago. Lloyd. Lloyd accidentally got married one day, when the girl he was sleeping with turned his post-coital hyperbole into a short lived and deranged reality. Their marriage was brief and unhappy. When Lloyd was mad at his wife, he’d get up in the…
I’m just an utter turd waffle sometimes Yesterday I literally accosted a woman, who did not know me, with details of her own private life that I’d learned through gossip. One of my friends had a book release yesterday, and I attended with an extremely foggy brain but a pridefully constructed “literary” outfit. And I…
Finally, one of Sedaris’ essays got made into a movie. I was so excited about this. Most people said the movie, C.O.G, was terrible. But that doesn’t mean much. When a book becomes a movie, everyone who loved the book is likely to see it as a gruesome impostor wearing the disguise of…
I spent three hours early this morning researching 19th century masturbation for my next article, until I was just so goddamn sad that I had to stop. I have been doing a series for The Week where I look at the outrageous hygiene and social advice given to people 100 years ago. It’s fun, funny.…
I hate flat gravestones. I know they are practical. I know they make it easy to drive a roaring, chopping engine reeking of gasoline and indifference right over them. But they are not monuments to the dead, eerie and sacred like they’re supposed to be. They’re just cheesy name tags, stuck to the ground after…
I had the good fortune to be born to a family of conservative rednecks. To my further posterity, I then spent my adolescence living inside a hive of religious nutcases. Then, another blessing, was to spend my adulthood surrounded by over-educated, flaming liberals. I am not being a smart-ass. I am lucky. The only thing those…
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