The Bloggy Blogface!

This past year of our Lord two-thousand eighteen marked the ten-year jubilee of my exodus from the Valley of the Sun. I always feel like they should just remove the V alley of  part from that nickname, because quite frankly who the hell cares. Hot is hot, no matter where you are. The winters were fine, the summers repulsive, and for a short time I tried to convince myself there was some sort of balance between the two that somehow made it worthwhile. That was, until my car got stolen. So fuck that city with a rusty lug wrench. Okay, fine. Maybe it wasn't all that bad, Outside of the weather and some punk ass kids taking my car for a day-long joy ride, Phoenix provided some decent joys here and there. Met a good variety of interesting people. Not many of whom were actually from Phoenix, of course. Phoenix is one of those towns where nobody is really from , where most just sort of drifted there, for whatever reasons they cough up your way. Many of the folks I crossed paths with we...

  Once upon a spring in the late 1980's, my sister and I dug our bicycles out from the shed and decided to embark on a journey. We were going to venture a little further than we normally would to get some candy and whatever else my sister was into by that age, like blank cassette tapes or White Rain hairspray. So we pedal our way out to Fay’s, an old chain drug store that exists now merely through its faded company logo on sides of some brick buildings in upstate New York. This particular Fay’s would carry some more notoriety many moons later, but for now it was just a bastion of junk food and baseball cards and cheap hairspray, among many things. We sandwiched our bikes around a parking lot pole, locked them together with a plastic-coated wire chain and padlock, and went inside. This Fay's sat to the right of a small Price Chopper plaza, our local grocery store. A couple smaller stores were to the left of Price Chopper, a sub shop and some jewelry place. As a family we hard...

   The first time I watched The Jetsons , I was eleven years old, and I thought they were pretty neat. The way they zipped around Orbit City in their flying cars was a great departure from the way we used to travel. My parents owned a light blue station wagon then, where we'd all pack in and head to burger and ice cream places like Jumpin' Jacks in the summer, or the mall on Saturdays. They loved taking the back roads which meant the slowest possible way to get to all the places, so my sister and I often took turns riding in the back cargo space, sometimes both fitting back there. My sister, at the time, was taller than me, with her lanky frame taking up most of the back space. Watching George, Jane, Judy and Elroy fly through the skies looked way more appealing than getting jabbed in the ribs with my sister's foot. The Jetsons were not my initial depiction of futuristic things back then. That belonged to the inside cover of my mother's high school yearbook. Her ye...

Tucked away inside a storage bin at my parent’s rented garage sits a thick red book. Its pages lined like graph paper, I used it as a writing journal for a good portion of the 2000’s. The entries begin in July 2003, at a Starbucks on the north shore of Long Island. They begin there as that is where my thirteen-hundred mile trek wound up, all the way from an Amtrak station in Little Rock, Arkansas a day and a half earlier. I chose the train because it was relatively cheaper than flying, and I had some time on my hands. It is a long trip, and one where you have to change trains at least twice. My first train switch occurred in Chicago. In the couple hours I had in between rides, an old friend stopped by Union Station to say hello and catch up in person. It had been awhile since we saw each other, mostly due to our geography. Not that distance made our friendship challenging, but she was probably never going to leave the midwest, and that was perfectly fine. Myself on the other hand, e...

I am a former Quad City DJ's dancer suffering from tennis elbow. Ask me anything! Hello! I am here to take your questions. Apologies in response time, it has been difficult to type these days. But, I’m going to try! This will be fun. Remember the Quad City DJ’s? Choo-choo!  Question 1. Jeff from Davenport! Are you from the real Quad Cities? My mom went to a school in Bettendorf named after Herbert Hoover. Do you know him? Answer: I know of President Herbert Hoover. However I do not know him personally, nor your mother, nor anything about the Quad Cities. I actually lived my life in southern Vermont, and never heard of the Quad Cities. Anyway, the band I danced for that caused me irreplaceable elbow nerve damage is called the Quad City DJ’s. They’re not from your neck of the woods. At least that’s not what they told me. Maybe one of these days I’ll come out there to visit. Maybe I’ll go by train! C’mon ride that train! Question 2. Kacey from Valdosta!  How did you get...

Back when I used to love cereal, or maybe thought that was the only thing we were supposed to eat for breakfast, I had a strange routine. The cereal cabinet was home to no less than four different varieties: Golden Crisp, Life, and Frosted Flakes always took up residence there, with at least one other brand mom wanted to try. I think my favorite might have been Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and sometimes my parents would get it for me, but I wasn't terribly devoted to it. I'm sure I just preferred it so I could drink the sweet cinnamon-sugared milk afterwards. I also liked Cocoa Pebbles, as it created every kid's favorite chocolate milk. But I didn't like how both Cocoa and Fruity Pebbles got soggy fairly quick, so I didn't opt for them much. Peanut Butter Crunch was another favorite, until about the time I realized it was murdering the roof of my mouth. I'd slurp down a couple bowls at the kitchen table, a small fixture in such a narrow space that I wrote about bef...