I had a few friends who spent winters after college being ski bums at Breckinridge. One year, two college buddies and I, flush with Christmas cash, decided to visit them. But rather than just fly to Colorado, we chose to fly to San Francisco for a New Year’s Eve party first, then drive more than a third of the way across the country to ski.
The New Year’s party was an absolute shit-show. Actually, more of a puke-show. Continue reading
In the dream, I’m on the moon.
I’m standing still. Scanning my immediate vicinity. Wondering exactly what I’m doing there.
Everything around me is just as you would expect. It’s like I’ve walked right into one of those documentaries about the Apollo missions. Continue reading
Do you still have that dress? You know the one I mean. Elegant, satiny, a little bit revealing. I was always asking you about it — even though you hardly ever wore the thing. Tell me it’s still in your closet.
Well, you can’t really tell me, of course — because I’m asking you here to wear it to my funeral. So I’m just going to assume you still have that dress. And that it still fits the way I remember. Continue reading
It was one of those internet relationships that people started having during the Late Aughts: We met online, exchanged pics, exchanged fantasies (mostly mine), exchanged racy pics (mostly hers), chatted, vidchatted. Then maybe vidchatted some more. Continue reading
Time to get serious again, folks! While cleaning out my parent’s first floor after the hurricane I came across some stories I had written. Luckily, the ink on most of them were still visible. The following is one of those stories. I wrote it in the Fall of 2005, towards the end of my battle with an eating disorder. Although I no longer suffer, each day I continue to struggle with it.
With her left hand she grips the porcelain bowl. The right index finger enters her mouth and moves back to the farthest reaches of her throat. She tickles her tonsils and feels the bile rise; almost there. Remove the finger, let the floodgates open and expel dinner. A running shower prevents detection. The bowl a putrid mixture of acid, food and soda. The tomato sauce had been tastier on the way down. Nothing sticks around for long. Continue reading
When I was overseas, I got the chance to walk through ancient Babylon, which had been rebuilt and preserved by Saddam Hussein in addition to a lavish palace addition next door. When I say “lavish”, don’t confuse the word with some empty top-shelf adjective; this palace is the embodiment of the word itself. Though it had long since been looted of every scrap of ornamentation the palace still radiated an air of quiet grandiosity.
I took a trip up there with some other guys from my comm shop for the day and spent hours just wandering through the palace, looking through room after room in awe. It was as if I had been transported back in time to some ancient world in which kings and emperors wielded their wealth as heavily as they did their swords. Continue reading
Since our apartment complex is a tight-knit bunch of people, we all decided to get together and have a pre-Thanksgiving potluck before everyone flew to the four winds for the holiday. Last night we all got together in the courtyard, each of us bearing delicious trays that we had prepared for the occasion. Since we have a huge ethnic diversity in the complex, we had everything from Hungarian food to Filipino food to Mexican and even good, old-fashioned gumbo, a Louisiana favorite. I ladled up a spoonful of the hot, savory stew over some brown rice and inhaled deeply; the aroma is something I haven’t smelled since I was a teenager in the deep South. Continue reading
About the time I herniated a disk in my back, a new guy named Joe transferred into my unit from a grunt battalion. His leg was held together by about fifty brazillion pins, thanks to a drunken sergeant who hazed him and about three other guys late one night and kicked Joe over a railing. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that hazing in the military is dead; it’s alive and well, just a little more subtle these days. Continue reading
To say that my home life growing up was anything approaching normal would be a stretch, so it came as no surprise to anyone when I announced to my folks that I was joining the Marines.
I don’t recall exactly what was going through my head when I made the decision; I do remember that I was home alone again, my parents out of town on yet another halleluiah tour of the Baptist churches in the surrounding states. At some point they had stopped insisting I keep uprooting myself to come along with them on these things, and I simply stopped going. They would be out of town three weeks out of the month, leaving me to attend school, work at the local grocery store, and sleep. Continue reading
I was an Air Force brat until age eight. When my father retired in 1978, we moved from Dover AFB to Baltimore, Maryland. As a college and Jesuit educated, ex-Captain of the military, my father insisted that his children not pick up 
the local accents of the areas in which we lived, especially the Baltimore brogue, which seemed to grate on him the most. However, to me, an accent meant, roots. It meant you lived somewhere long enough to develop the local speak. I didn’t have the luxury of staying in one place during early formative years, and I think that is why one’s accent appeals to me and why I pay close attention to every accent I come in contact with envy. Continue reading
