So during yet another a brief hiatus from the December January Album essays I’m taking a few minutes to list my Favorite Albums from the first decade of the 2000’s. If you want to get technical, I suppose this is a Best Of list for me, considering I liked these albums the best. But really, [...]
When you’re a kid time has a way of passing with the speed and urgency of an elderly turtle with four broken legs on his way to visit his proctologist. Important events—Christmas, your birthday, the end of the school day—always seem forever fleeting, forever away. In fact, “This is taking forever” seems to be right [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
