Santa’s on Xanax
Sitting -- toe deep -- in the white-beach pseudo-snow, the tides tying time into knots of irrelevancies . . .…
Elegiac, Creeping, Oceanic
So I was sitting in a Starbucks at this sort of long, skinny table with two stools at it; I…
Unfinished Business
Jack Harvey had been coming to Germany for many years. A successful salesman whose retirement was quickly approaching, he wanted…
Miley Cyrus and the Pornification of America
There’s a strange irony to the fact that on the same week of the 93rd anniversary of the ratification of…
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here—The American Prison System
Imitating Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous work on the gulag prison system in Soviet Russia, The First Circle, Jens Soering portrays himself…
(Alien) Baby Got Back
The rain was falling down, down hard against the ground. The roads were flooded. Darkness spread, and even the motel…
I prefer funerals.
I worked for years as a church custodian, and I always liked working funerals better than weddings. For one thing,…
The NSA: ‘The Abyss from Which There Is No Return’
We now find ourselves operating in a strange paradigm where the government not only views the citizenry as suspects but…
What’s Wrong With President Coin? The Hunger Games, Rousseau, and the Future of Compassion
The Hunger Games trilogy has evolved from the little book that could (the initial, modest success of the first novel…
Woman II and Impressionist with Synesthesia
Light clinging to my teeth, the pulleys in my cheeks playing tug of war relentlessly, wondering if the noise of…