The Bloggy Blogface!

I started this blog a little over six years ago. It replaced one I think was called Blog of Advertising Fail. Before that there might have been another one I wrote from this platform, but I don't recall its name. Prior to Blogger I was on Livejournal, like all the other angsty twenty to thirtysomethings were. Needless to say the 2000's have been pretty unstable in my approach to posting public drivel. As another birthday slowly creeps in, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. I'm still writing, just not on here. Not as prolific as I would like, but that's beside the point. I've been researching other platforms to post from, but then I get to thinking why bother? I barely post on this one I have now. I recently deleted a Tinyletter account I created last March. I had to request and reset password and login information, just to get inside. It had one post, unfinished. And, of course, unsent due to having zero subscribers. I also took down a Wordpress...

A long time ago, I was briefly a district manager for a local newspaper. A district manager, at least for this paper, was the fancy name for the supervisor of all those who delivered the paper in a certain area. I wasn't very good at it, mostly because I absolutely suck eggs at math. Every Friday afternoon, myself and five other district managers would sit at a long table with dividers and calculate the business of our designated areas for the end of the week. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, balancing some sort of ledger and what not. As much as I tried to be proficient, I was always the last of the managers to leave. The first thing I was told to do upon being hired was to fire one of my delivery persons, a man twice my age who lived in some strange-looking home along a dirt road embankment. Up until that point in my adult working life, I never had to fire anyone. The man didn't take it too kindly, both on the phone and in person, and within a matter of days many...

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...