Lars Fox, with whom some of you are familiar, just had an interview published in my second home The Nervous Breakdown.
He didn’t win a Grammy the other night, but dammit, he’s got this! Drop …
The care and feeding of the impossibly small
The odds and sods of this and that
An accounting of my father and his resident alien
An accounting of my folly with fowl
Person rearing for amateurs
This morning I found parity while looking, scrambling really, for socks and I found Drunk Hercules instead. Herc is a key chain fob that broke years ago, and at some point shifted his drunkenness out of my handbag into my top drawer where the undies and socks reside, to live near the frills of my last vestiges of youthful lingerie. I found him after pulling out seven socks with no mate and digging deep into the unknown wastes of underwear I haven’t seen for years, where he was wrapped up in a garter belt. And looking at both Herc, of whom I’m so fond, and the utterly impractical garter belt, I realized that Herc would live on down there in my drawer, but the garter belt had reached its expiration date. Read the full story »
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Two days ago I drove past a store which has been an anchor of the neighborhood I live in for the last two decades. A sign on the door said that the proprietor, Greg Klaus, …
Ever since I’ve been allowed to hurl my musings at The Nervous Breakdown, expanding my readership beyond my usual four, now that I have the potential for an audience of at least five, my brain …
When we heard that another terrorist attempt had taken place on a plane descending for Detroit on Christmas day, we had just decided to take a trip to Mexico. Immediately I began crunching the numbers …
A few years ago, I put up a bird feeder in the back yard. I had landscaped everything to verdant idyll, making it a perfect sanctuary for my avian pals, save for the cats. But …
It’s safe to say that I had very little sense of self-preservation when I was younger. I was plagued by demons, doubts, profound questions about how to live a life worth living, symptoms I’m pretty …
The year that would never end began on January 5, 2009.
We didn’t know then what we know now: we were taking the first steps in a marathon. Had we, things might have been different. We …
I was too much a daughter to my father to know much about his career as a professor of the humanities, other than a few days I went to work with him as a kid.
But …
When you’re in the gymnasium during “Career Day” take a closer look. Things are different these days.
The same folding tables and chairs with earnest recruiters from the Fire Department and Police Department are still there, …
Last year, which we just kissed goodbye thank-you-very-much, was a difficult year. I know I’m not alone; uniformly, everyone I talk to suffered some horrible challenge last year, and maybe rose to meet it, or …
It was about the time that I began critiquing the fashion choices of our fellow passengers in the Long Beach Airport that I realized I may have reached my limit for what the brain could …
We have five chickens, all of them completely impractical birds. There’s one whopper and four midgets, smaller but less destructive as a result. Not from any lack of trying, though.
Gigi is the foster mother of …
Dad is now six months into “managing cancer.” He got his third hormone shot, the last in the keister which is probably a relief. Although now they’ll be giving him a shot in the stomach …
I lay in bed last night, tossing and turning with apparently little else to do, thinking about the internet and the propensity of people to abbreviate everything to get their point across. But I find …
The obligatory social functions one is committed to once you have a child are difficult for shut-in’s like myself. If I was childless, younger and spoke completely off the cuff, no problem: my outbursts might …
When my husband and I were footloose and fancy-free, we took a belated honeymoon to Italy. It was several years after we were married, but no less sweet because of its delay, and we embraced …
I concluded my little holiday book (which people will receive in lieu of those traitorous fruits) with this footnote:
I have seen my Drunken Cherries through to their conclusion, and there’s been no step which hasn’t …
Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!
Walt Whitman (1819–1892), “O …
The whole house is laid out this week. My nagging virus has turned into a she-beast of laryngitis; my husband keeps getting more and more work as the rest of the house falls apart around …
“You have no idea what a pleasure it is to go to the bathroom,” Dad said. “A completely underrated experience.”
This is the sort of comment that peppers our conversations these days. We still talk about …
In this final chapter, our puppet dictator finds herself in a white trash nightmare of her own making…
The grass was bare. The shrubs scratched to the roots. The plants either eaten by chickens, or merely …
My son and I went to New Orleans last January to visit his papa while he was working there for an extended period. The day before our flight, our son spiked with a fever of …
I know you all are way beyond “winners” and “losers” in the baby roulette, but I figure that I’m a person that finishes things, so here goes.
Special, extra warm thanks to for compiling the …
