This began life as a Facebook note, but don’t hold that against it. I am casting a wide net.
Not too long ago, Holly and I were talking about some demerit our house had just earned. Maybe Libby was pathetically pressing her face to the glass of the back door, as she does every other day [...]

I have been thinking back to when I was a kid, and doings at the North Pole were still a going concern every December. Imagine, if you will, that today is a very long night before Christmas. Imagine that you are at home in your jammies, and all the parties are partied and all the [...]

In 2000, a 23-year-old Republican friend of mine ran for state representative against a Democratic incumbent in a deeply blue district. I was one of many people who volunteered on behalf of his campaign. As the 2008 election comes to a merciful close, I find myself thinking about that campaign more and more, so I [...]

As I stare deeply into the news until the news stares back at me, I keep having vignettes pop into my head. I’m writing three-second short stories for myself all day, like when you’re people watching at the airport but on a much bigger scale.
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I imagine being picked as the candidate for vice president. I [...]

I stared at the e-mail at the bottom of the list for another ten seconds. I had read and/or replied to everything else, even the bank statement, and that last message had been sitting there every day for a week unread. Occasionally during that week, I had accidentally highlighted the “Subject:” line, and each time [...]

Another one off the request lines. You want the Gay Dude, I give you the Gay Dude:
November 21, 1998
These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about something that happened this summer outside the tenement where I live. I realize that I don’t talk about my apartment or my neighbors very much. That isn’t [...]

As hard as it would one day be to believe, my parents began their lives together as optimists, even though everyone they loved literally ran from their wedding screaming. I am the least superstitious person on earth, and even I might have taken that as some kind of omen.
When Mom and Dad met at the [...]

Every week, usually around Wednesday afternoon, a special, magical, delicate hunk of my soul withers like a flower petal and falls off.
Any time I put something online, I have the hardest time grappling with that moment when the blog post or column or bon mot I wrote disappears from the site’s front page, having been [...]

Five years ago, my life was completely different. I had the same parents I have now, but that’s about it.
Five years ago last month, I didn’t know my wife. Not in the way my dad doesn’t know my mom; I mean we literally had not been introduced five years ago last July. I was living [...]

When I was little and didn’t know anything about anything, I used to pride myself on being mature for my age. Teachers made notes on my report cards that said things like, “Jim is 8 going on 33,” and I took those things to heart and made them a big part of my self-identification growing [...]

The first assignment I had in my recent creative writing class was of the classic variety: “Write a story about a _____ without mentioning the _____ anywhere in the story.” It turned out better than I could have hoped, so for the hell of it I thought I would post it here. Enjoy.
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In all his [...]

When I started dating my wife, one of the things I liked the most about her was that we both wanted the same things out of life.
No. That’s not true. We both wanted completely different things out of life, but the differences were so compatible they fit together like Ikea furniture. Each of us was [...]

Sometimes, you decide you’re going to write something momentous, and the weight of that hypothetical essay becomes too heavy for you to move your fingers on the keyboard. My wife is going to give birth to our first child essentially any day now, and that is a Big Deal, and before the child is born [...]

Mythbusting Quiz
1. If I gave you a text file full of code for your web page, and that file was named “Code to paste.txt,” what would you do with it?
   a. paste it onto the page
   b. see its name and decide to turn it into a Javascript file and put it somewhere completely different
2. In [...]

Marriage is about compromise, and compromise is about occasionally sitting back and accepting things that you would otherwise never allow. Living single, my wife wouldn’t have an AT-AT in the living room, and it is highly unlikely that the bookcase by her front door would have a year’s worth of comic books piled high on [...]

A week or so ago, right before Mother’s Day, the missus and I took my mom and dad out to dinner at a local Mexican chain. Getting my folks to go out has gotten increasingly difficult over the years, but the joint was having a fundraiser for the neighborhood Catholic school, and despite their age [...]

It is tempting (if ghoulish) to joke that the Lord must have lifted His veil of protection and smote the Reverend Jerry Falwell today for his 4,000th stupid remark. News like this stirs up some complicated feelings. There are thoughtful people in this world with whom we disagree; there are people who are genuinely good, [...]

About once a week for the past few weeks, I’ve been having these Vietnam acid flashbacks where a neuron has suddenly come out of retirement. I don’t know if I’m getting more sleep or way too little, but I will be driving to work or washing my hair and suddenly relive something I haven’t given [...]

Well, we are nearing the halfway point of my wife’s pregnancy now, and I think I’m just about ready.
Oh, I know. “You can’t ever be ready.” That’s what They say. Let’s be honest, though: how often are They right about anything? Really? Everyone tells you that parenthood is a constant state of fretting, hypochondria, projecting [...]

I try to make an effort to give things the benefit of the doubt, but I recognize that making an effort shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. I don’t think of myself as a particularly open-minded person. That’s especially true when it comes to the People’s art; as I get older, I find myself [...]