Amusing Myself to Death

I’m a sucker for transformation movies, but not the right sort. The hard-fought back-from-homelessness Lifetime movie based on a true story ought to inspire me and doesn’t.
But give me characters who find themselves in the body of their high school selves, who cross television sets to relocate in a fifties sitcom, who [...]

Misprinted News Photo

After-images seep from each—cyan
souls running out of a badly stained,
framed flat square: bodies fallen
in foreign alphabet, paired legs,
rifle butts overlapped, mismatched
blood an oddly sparse, two-toned,
puddled color. All errors of printing
we read through. Someone knows
the shoe heels slowly eroded
by eighth moons. Under slivered faces
slipping at every printed reiteration,
someone knows the love handles
exposed by [...]

Another Slice

Yesterday afternoon, I noted that I’d never seen the shorts my son was wearing. “That’s funny,” he replied, “you said exactly the same thing when I wore them last time.”
My heart executed a panicked flip as I tried to remember—seeing them and/or noting them—but absolutely nothing came. In a few moments [...]

Final Transmission to Pioneer 10*

Headed toward Ross 248 in the Constellation of Taurus…
We stand watching like our pictures on your plaque,
one hand up in our most innocent gesture—
hello when we etched it, now good-bye.
We’ve known our words in your ear would break up.
Water dropped down our black well won’t cohere
and aimed as properly as we are able, our [...]

Zero Comments

The science fiction novel, The Killing Star, by Charles Pellagrino and George Zebrowski, opens with a cautionary analogy: looking for alien life is like shouting your name and location in Central Park in the middle of the night—niave and dangerous. I sometimes wonder about blogs in the same respect, whether, unknowingly, I’m [...]

Haiku

For a while I kept a list of titles on a scrap of paper in my satchel—“The Invisible Landscape,” “Famous on Radio,” “My Secret Affection for Hats,” and “On Not Writing.” Few become anything more than ghostly plans, imaginary gray pages. Without a personal agent—I picture Burgess Meredith—to follow me around [...]

I Hate Blogs…

but I’m stuck with the word…
It is an uneditable on this page–along with the arrangement of text, the fonts available, the categories for imput, the range of colors possible, and the background.
Other than that, this page is entirely my own.
A friend said recently that anyone could direct a play on a great [...]

On Quitting

When I think of my brief career as an eighth grade high jumper, the smell of the pit comes back first–a mixture of mildew and the wintergreen “atomic balm” we rubbed on our legs–but I also recall tumbling into the bar over and over as if I were turning in a particularly [...]

Most Days…

I could be living anywhere, but some mornings I wake to the city. My walk to work takes me under the el track the moment the train passes over, or I’m blasted by the uplift of warmth from sidewalk grates. Some mornings I hear the [...]

If I Could Choose a Religion…

…I’d be a movie Buddhist.
I fantasize walking in snow barefoot with unhurried steps and a quizzical smile on my lips. I dream of nodding benignly at people who insinuate I’m stupid. A movie Buddhist can answer in articleless aphorisms and somehow fill everyone with unanswerable wisdom. I’d like to [...]