This morning I’m standing at the starting line of the Helderberg-to-Hudson Half Marathon and asking myself the question I always do at the beginning of a race: What the hell am I doing here? I want to blame Harriet, who back in December said she was signing up to run a half and I should too. But I hadn’t run a race in ten years. I hadn’t run longer than five miles at a time. My toes are...
On this day in 1972, my father turned 45 years old. This was the year he’d been promoted to an executive position at the pharmaceutical company where he worked, and the year he moved his family of seven from a small and crowded house to a much larger house on a quiet avenue in North Buffalo. Was it also the year he began to suffer a midlife crisis? Or was he simply expressing himself? Like many...
It’s a bit of a morose group for an Easter Sunday, circa sometime in the late 1960s. Despite the background, this is not a cell block. On the right is the asbestos-laden fake brick siding on the unheated room we called the shanty at the back of my grandmother’s house in Niagara Falls. The wall on the left is the beer distributor warehouse next door. In summer, the wall is fronted by tall tomato...
It’s a bit of a morose group for an Easter Sunday. Despite the background, this is not a cell block. On the right is the asbestos-laden fake brick siding on the unheated room we called the shanty at the back of my grandmother’s in Niagara Falls. The wall on the left is the beer distributor warehouse next door. In summer, the wall is fronted by tall tomato plants with swollen red fruit. From left...
George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 is quoted more than ever these days. He writes: “Who controls the past controls the future . . .” I’m indignant about Florida rejecting a high-school Black History AP text because it made our country seem too racist. The text included lessons on abominations like slavery that apparently were too sympathetic to “them” and not sympathetic enough to “us.” In...
I’m pleased to let you know my next novel, In Flight, has been published and is available right now, right here! What’s this story about, you ask? After surviving a plane crash but suffering a trauma-induced fugue state, a successful executive and family man attempts to put his life back together while enduring the stigma of his psychological collapse. Logline: “Only in the moment of...
You might have heard that a principal of a Florida school is out of a job after sixth-grade students were shown (exposed to?) an image of Michelangelo’s statue of David in a Renaissance art class. Some parents complained they hadn’t been notified that an image of the statue would be shown in the classroom. They hadn’t realized their children would be subject to “pornography.” Because if you look...
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Google’s Bard—there’s an arms race going on in the artificial intelligence (AI) world, and I’m beginning to see why. These tools pack power. A while ago, I tried an AI tool called Rytr to create a blog post about how to write and publish a novel. The results were informative but obvious, a little dull, and a bit repetitive. Since then, I’ve been toying...
About a year ago I noticed a car with a logo I didn’t recognize. Could there be a new car company making a push into this competitive industry? Then I discovered it was a rebrand for the Korean car company Kia. I, along with many others, didn’t see the word Kia in the new logo. After doing a little research, I discovered that at least 30,000 people a month search for the “KN car.” People think...
I came across an opinion piece in the NYT by the writer Tim Urban that had a good news/bad news structure to it. The bad news was called Depressing Math. It means we don’t have nearly the amount of time we think we have to do what we love. The example he used that hit closest to home for me was about spending time with his parents. He wrote: I grew up spending some time with my parents almost...
I was born on Christmas, December 25. My brother, Peter, three years older than me, was also born on Christmas. So right from the start I’m sharing my birthday with both my brother AND baby Jesus. If that wasn’t enough to dilute my birthday, Christmas was a big deal in my family. There was the tree to acquire, the Advent calendar to hang, the decorations to bring out. Every Christmas Eve we’d...
This post contains graphic visual content. We noticed the telltale black droppings under the lazy susan cabinet. Then when I was down in my old basement office where I still keep the printer, I spotted a mouse skittering along the heating pipe. Julia and Owen both reported sightings in their rooms. Never before had the second-floor bedrooms been breached. This was an outrage and an emergency call...
I was fortunate to get away for a long weekend to Florida with Harriet to visit her mom in Sarasota. There are benefits to sunshine and warm temps. There is joy in biking, tennis, swimming, walking on the beach, and seeing loved ones. There is calm in putting aside work and responsibilities for a few days. But about Florida, I’m conflicted. Beautiful beaches—yes. Fine weather—for the winter...
What is it about skating on a frozen pond that makes me feel poetic? There was “Skating on a Winter Night” a few years ago with Owen and my friends when we had sticks and pucks. And then there was this past weekend on Black Creek Marsh. We had to hike a snowy trail down to the windswept ice and we tested its thickness, walking out on the surface, gingerly, one step and then another...
It doesn’t happen often enough but when the sun comes out during the winter, I’m compelled to have its rays upon me. The bare trees cooperate by letting more of the light land on me. Bennett Hill is just fifteen minutes from my house and a favorite hike because of its well-marked trails, a dose of steepness, and its winter landscape of gray and white and brown. Bare trees cast long...
