Sober New Year

New Year’s Eve. For many folks, that means one thing: TIME TO DRINK UP. Not me, though. I didn’t know  the extent of my drinking problem until  stopped drinking. I was clued in to how bad it was when I told my friends I had sobered up.  Every single one of them reacted the same way. “Oh thank God.”…

The Blog Slog

My buddy Bryan pretty much invented a Blogger for himself out of php back in 1998. It connected to a site called Disturbance, a combination journal, rant factory and review of the world at large. Bryan taught me the trick of commenting out various parts of an entry so only your friends could see them: Went to…

Travel + a poem

Guess where I am?  Yep. 500 miles per hours, the speed at which (according to John D. MacDonald) a .45 bullet travels. Travel is always strange for me. Strange and delightful. Perhaps this is because airplanes are one of the only places where I see large groups of people reading books (albeit “airport books.”). I make…

Thomas Berger

Having just concluded reading Little Big Man to my daughter, I have a new and deeper appreciation for Thomas Berger. For whatever reason, he has been largely ignored by modern literary culture–so much, in fact,   that I was unaware he died back in July. The man wrote twenty-two novels of many different types, each one a paragon…