So I’ve been asked about the Album Essays. I’m going to finish them soon. I picked a bad month to try and knock them out. The holidays were time consuming. And I got sidetracked playing Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2. I’m not going to lie. But I’m having too much fun to give up [...]
Since the day I started writing I was a failure. I just never knew it. Teachers gave me good grades, people gave me favorable comments, and the few places I submitted or contributed my stuff to published it. I was a big fish in a small pond if only by default, but I had no [...]
Sometimes there is no good explanation for what happens in life, the ways and whys of things, how paths sometimes lead you to unclaimed $20 bills, how in certain rooms at certain times you fall in love with someone you wouldn’t otherwise give a second-look to. The same thing goes for music; it’s just as [...]
This is a guest post from Caleb J Ross, author of the chapbook Charactered Pieces: stories, as part of his ridiculously named Blog Orgy Tour. Visit his website for a full list of blog stops. Charactered Pieces: stories is currently available from OW Press (or Amazon.com). Visit him at http://www.calebjross.com. Music is a way to [...]
I’ll never be confused for a prophet; if I could tell the future there wouldn’t have been any heartache, any bad decisions, I wouldn’t have invested in Beanie Babies. But on more than one occasion in my life I’ve had these overwhelming feelings—a sixth sense, intuition, or whatever you call it—where I knew what was [...]
The writing bug first bit me in 11th grade. I was taking a Journalism class, and for our final exam my teacher gave me two options: interview the gym teacher about the track-and-field team, or write a short story. I had no idea what went into writing a short story, but interviewing the gym teacher [...]
I survived my first year at college. It wasn’t without scars; after deciding to return, despite the debacle at the end of my first semester, not too far into the second one I fooled around and fell into credit card debt. I got blinded by a smile. It was a damn good smile, easy on [...]
Confidence is like a mountain. Standing at the bottom, the apex looks a mile away. When you’re down, the higher up you have to look, the more unreachable it seems. Some like the challenge; they feed off it. Others, it’s just as easy to say the hell with it; why bother, misery loves company and [...]
Growing up, I never thought about college much. It wasn’t even so much a hypothetical as it was a non-issue. In high school, amongst my closest friends, college was a word the same way onomatopoeia was a word; if you used it you were probably using it wrong. There were plenty of other words we [...]
If you want to get technical, the 2000’s for me started in downtown Buffalo, NY. I was in pleather pants and a long-sleeve purple velvet shirt, smack dab in the middle of 18,000 people at a Barenaked Ladies concert. I was neither drunk nor high, despite what my choice of apparel might imply. I was [...]
