The Marionette

 I was 11 years old when I learned that “authority” wasn’t synonymous with fair, or right, or reasonable. During the first half of sixth grade, at Hyde Park Elementary School back in 1981, I was one of a select group of students who were permitted to leave Mrs. Hewitt’s English/Spelling/Grammar...

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Headaches Are A Pain

I suffered from debilitating migraine headaches for the first 19 years of my life. I’d get them two or three times a week. These headaches could either come about slowly, where I could feel one coming on about an hour or two before it really got its hooks into me, or they could just come out of nowhere;...

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Teenage Dream Come True

Ever since I first saw the Cincinnati Stingers hockey puck that my friend Donny had, I had wanted one. Whenever we’d spend time together at his house, either playing on the computer (Timex Sinclair 1000), rocking out to Def Leppard’s Pyromania, or whatever the hell else 13-year-olds did in 1983, I always...

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Unaware and Don't Care

 For a good, long time (since the late 1980’s), I’ve worn a hat.  Until recently, it’s always been a baseball cap.  I once had this grand idea that I would get 366 baseball caps, one for each day of the year, plus 1 outrageous one for Feb 29th.  That plan never came to fruition,...

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The Bread Shelf Boy

 I began dating the woman would become my wife, L, in 1987. I was a Junior in high school. She was a Senior. After she left my house on the night that she first met my parents, my mom said, “She looks just the same.” As you can imagine, I was a bit stunned by this comment. “What do you mean?”...

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Three Little Words

 I HATE television shows that end with “To be continued…” After spending approximately an hour going through the emotional ups and downs of the characters as they search for one of their friends who had been kidnapped by an elite criminal organization…and that friend is being tortured and about...

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Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

A good number of years ago when my daughter, S, was in third grade, her school had a technology fund raiser. These particular funds were raised by students selling items from the Sally Foster Catalog. Of course, there were incentives designed to motivate the students to sell. If a student collected...

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