The Truth About the Expulsion
An Address Delivered at the East Orange Women’s Conference First of all, I wanted to go. Adam was the one who wanted to stay. If it was up to him, we’d still be there, spending eternity in mind-numbing peace and tranquility, every day sunnier and cheerier than the previous. Sure, it was Paradise, but Paradise gets old real fast without any contrast. Besides, it wasn’t Paradise with a guy like Adam. Bloated with his First Man persona, he thought it was he and only he who should name all the creatures that walked on land and swam in the sea. And they were the most boring names....
Read MoreSpots
Midst purgatory’s weedfields sprouts one clover. On blinded shelves, between the pulp and pap, a dashed and stashed encryption offers sight as fortitude is found in looking over the life of Job, the context of mishap. And even the most sweat-sopped marish night about to drown you in its sea of horror dissolves in dawn: The dark defines the light. So if I’m looking at a fun-house mirror or through a curved perverted looking glass to spot a glimmer through a pane of terror of what you say shall never come to pass, it could be that you aren’t looking right. The dark of sunspots, after...
Read MoreCookies of Fortune
I scanned the Golden Gate Bridge toting fortune cookies in my backpack, the wind whipping the hair islands encircling my ears and chilling the crown of my head. The elements were unkind to balding men like me. My bushy mustache warmed my upper lip, which didn’t require warming. I had hair everywhere but where I wanted it, where it would have benefited me in becoming a ladies’ man or even a man’s man. I was clownish. But I didn’t mind. I was in the business of making people laugh. I could usually detect the ones I had come for from across the bridge. Their silhouettes, alone and...
Read MoreChoices
“…if poets (often lacking God, less often lacking cats)…” – Dan Chiasson I’ve often heard that politicians own dogs and we with creative natures tend towards cats, and I wonder why. Do politicians need clear emotions, eyes filled with slavish devotion or rage on the verge of attack, while we of poetic bent have become accustomed to the blank, disinterested...
Read MoreThe Secret History of Walter Mitty
The movie starring Ben Stiller tells the story of Walter Mitty, whose daydreams constitute his secret life. The story is from James Thurber, an iconic humorist who died in 1961, leaving behind a passel of great yet mostly forgotten cartoons and essays in The New Yorker, plus the one short story for which he is best known, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” (a brief delight which made it into many high school English textbooks, but was mostly skimmed over by jocks on their way to football practice… since they already knew on which cheek their buns were buttered, having no imagination to...
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