Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
I found myself on the patio at the house of a guy I’d just met that day. I was among a group of people I mostly didn’t know and one of them happened to be my high school rowing coach at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute some fifty years ago. Coach Bernie didn’t remember me, of course, but I’d had advance notice from John that he would be a participant in the group bike ride I’d been invited...
I’m helping my beloved niece, Lucy, paint her apartment bedroom. More accurately, she’s helping me. She doesn’t have experience painting a room and today I’m going to teach her. Fortunately, my sister Susan made sure the walls are prepped and ready to go. Putting on the paint is the easy, rewarding part. There are two tasks to painting a room wall: cutting in the edges using a brush and rolling...
Dandelion season is my lawn at its finest with a constellation of little golden suns on a spring green canvas. I wish it could last all summer. The blooms set at night and rise in the morning and shine all day, but only for a few weeks, and then the flowers are gone to seed, and a lucky few of them will be new suns next year.
April 20 (4/20) is weed day. The day got its name in the 1970s in California when a group of high school students met after school around 4:20 to get high and 4/20 became a code phrase they could use in front of their parents. Clever stoner types, these high school kids. The reputation of 4/20 spread from there. 420 Magazine, founded in 1993, has a mission around creating cannabis awareness. I...
I’m coming right out and saying it: The new rest areas on the New York State Thruway SUCK! I happened to stop in one of the newly opened rest areas on my way to Buffalo the other day. It felt ridiculously tight. There was only one double door at the entrance, and people were coming in and out and getting in each other’s way. The old rest areas had at least two sets of double doors. But I supposed...
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...
The golden age of television is considered to be the 1950s, the era when the production of many new shows ramped up, and series like I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, and Leave it to Beaver ruled the tube. In reality, this is the golden age of television, if you add streaming to the mix. There are so many quality shows right now that people who don’t spend hours every day watching (that would be...
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...
One of the benefits of living where I do is that the New York State Writer’s Institute is located here. Last night I got to see the acclaimed novelist Jennifer Egan, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for A Visit From the Good Squad (my review), and was here to talk about her most recent novel, The Candy House (my review). Goon Squad has a secure place on the list of “The Most Important Novels in...
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...
Sometimes I read a passage that strikes so close to me that it answers the question: Why do I read? In the novel, Trust, by Hernan Diaz, a young woman, Helen, walks from a European villa where she is staying into a nearby town, 1920s: The dry echo of her shoes on the cobblestones was all she could hear in the empty streets. Every few steps, she gently dragged a foot, just to feel the skin on her...
I’m not one to gravitate toward a television series based on a video game, but I’ve looked over Owen’s shoulder a few times while he played “The Last of Us,” got absorbed in that story world, and then became interested in checking out the HBO series by the same time. I’m glad I did. Set in a post-apocalyptic world mostly destroyed by zombie-like humans who have been infected with a...
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...
When I see the list of films that have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture this year, I’m dismayed. I’ve seen about half of them. They were decent, but none of them stood out to me as worthy of great honors. I believe the feature film as a storytelling device is in steep decline, replaced by the limited or recurring series streaming or on cable television. But I still love going...
