Second tough year in a row? Well, at least you can take comfort in knowing you had some good posts to read.

Here are the top 5 blog posts from 2021, according to viewership:

My review of Spider-Man: No Way Home

What Clint Smith and Frederick Douglas Taught Me About Critical Race Theory

I Was Wrong About Starbucks

My Review of The Circles Around Us by Brad and Kristie Montague

Where Have All the Gargoyles Gone? An Open Letter to FHU Students about Makin’ Music

It’s always something, isn’t it?
Sometimes what makes it hard to lose someone is that you lose them slowly over time. Their health and their memory are taken long before they are. Lyn Shrader was a man with such a strong and vibrant soul that even as his mind faded in his last years, the memory of the man he was persists loudly today.

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“No one wants to be married to the guy who thinks he’s going to save the world.”

I bought a book on my Kindle after hearing an interview with the author on NPR, and it may have been the first time I’ve done that. I know nothing about the world of startups, but being one of billions of people hooked up to them, I catch a whiff of that culture all the time. It seeps into anything and everything. Just one passage intrigued me enough to read it through. That book is The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam. Continue reading →

Happy Monday, readers!

This week two of my poems are appearing in Modern Poetry Quarterly Review:

“Amazzacaffè”

and

“Cobbler Gnomes”

You can read them, and other poetry, by clicking here.

It’s not hard to believe that twenty years ago I walked into my high school German class to hear a classmate tell me that a guy flew a plane into the twin towers. I’m not hard on myself for laughing at first, because I instantly thought he meant some idiot who couldn’t fly steered his tiny plane into the building—it’s sad, but the kind of story we might chuckle at. Then they told me the rest of the story. This was no accident, and there were many deaths, and more to come in the following hours. To be honest, I didn’t feel furious or scared or heartbroken. Just shocked. What? This? Why? Continue reading →

Well folks, it looks like, depending on where you live, your mask may be coming off for good here pretty soon.

To celebrate the wearing of our masks and the removing of the masks, I want to hear from you.

We’re taking a poll. At the end of the day, when you leave your place of work or wherever else you go, how do you remove your mask?

Here’s your choices:

How do you remove your mask?
a) Like a doctor who just got out of a failed surgery on Grey’s Anatomy
b) Like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible
c) Like Kylo Ren, hissy fit and all
d) Like an astronaut after the capsule re-pressurized
e) Hannibal Lecter style

I’m not doing. If there is one. If there is going to be an outright civil war, I’m not participating it. I’ve got better things to do.

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If you’ve read anything this year, it might have been some fine fiction that helped you escape from everything going on around you. Or maybe help you deal with current anxieties by getting you thinking about other anxieties. But eventually you will look back on everything you went through and see it through the eyes of a character. Continue reading →