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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

We’ve been in the grips of the holidays and just returned from a completely non-relaxing trip to California, about which I am trying to string together two sentences that mean much of anything. But I’m …

My husband wanted to revisit some of my finest work. Here is his favorite poem (I’ve probably written two, so it’s no high watermark) in its entirety. It is a haiku series. It is deep. …

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 …