All Posts

Living in catacombs, the darkness breathes I don’t need you. If you could see me, you could see that I don’t care. These bones surround me. These crumbling ruins have memories that stink like rage. A tower of babble, a pedestal I built for you to stand. I’d knock you off it if I could find a way. I know what you said, I heard every lie, pretending not to hear. My praying hands closed over tattooed stigmata. God has never bent to listen. My prayer unanswered, no miracle mi

In the morning, there are dogs barking from kennels far away, an occasional rooster crowing, and maybe a far-off peacock. Dreamsicle, “our” feral cat, waits in the middle of the backyard, sometimes looking like a dead fuzzy wad of orange and white fur, sometimes standing alert and staring at our back door. Dreamy is usually there between 6:30 and 8. If we’re any later filling his dish with crunchies and dropping a handful of treats beside the bowl, we may not see him at all.

Louis Miller sat on a log and watched the world float by When he saw the body floating in the river he thought it was a log But the log had a face and it once had thoughts and it once loved Louis Miller Janey O'Malley took down a dress from its place in the cedar closet When she put it on she looked in the mirror and saw her mother there But her mother had died and she once looked like Janey and she once loved Louis Miller Louis Miller was a married man A bum, a saint, a

AI can do a lot of good. It strengthens healthcare by detecting diseases earlier, automating routine clinical tasks, predicting patient risks, accelerating drug discovery, and assisting surgeons with precise robotic tools. It boosts productivity by speeding up writing, coding, customer support, and everyday office tasks, raising output across industries. AI expands accessibility through real‑time translation, speech‑to‑text, adaptive voice controls, automatic alt text, and to

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was all-in on cyberpunk. Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Blade Runner. The grungy, computerized, miraculous future of brainjacking, lightcycles, and 7-11 snack Faxes. All fantasy, but, in my mind, possible. Of course, I didn’t expect any of those exciting things to be real in my lifetime. But here in 2026, we’re closer to some of them than 30-year-old me would ever have thought possible: Companies like Neuralink, Blackrock Microsystems, Medtroni

Part I: The Horse Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that lets machines mimic how humans learn, understand, solve problems, make decisions, and create. AI-powered apps and devices can recognize what they see, understand, and respond to human language, learn from new data, give detailed recommendations, and even act on their own — like a self‑driving car. Full disclosure, I use AI. Sometimes Google Gemini or Venice.ai to generate the images I use in My Mind and Welc

Crushes There was a girl back home whom I was truly, deeply, madly in love with, as in love as any boy who had never been in love could be. We had both dated others, were never exclusive, and, looking back, were probably—really—just the absolute best of friends—but that read as love to me. I still have that glow in my heart. That said, college was a revelation. Here was a literal surfeit of NEW girls. Women! Women I had not spent most of 12 years being acquainted with in on

Author's Note: It's been a busy week, so I kind of half-assed this installment. Sorry, not sorry. Pledging continued, and a few guys who didn’t go through the official rush joined during open rush a couple of weeks later. Those of us who were freshmen settled into a new post-high school reality. For most of us, it was the first time we were away from home for an extended period. No parents, no siblings, no pets. Our accustomed safety nets were suddenly anything from a quic

After the mixers, parties, hangovers, and a couple of weeks of normal freshman life on a small college campus, Fraternity Rush was finally winding down, with bids extended and decisions made. I got bids from Sigma Nu and Sigma Phi Epsilon, and I had to make my decision before leaving Dean of Students Gorell’s office. I chose the Sig Eps, and, looking back, I think it was for a few reasons: the Snakes reminded me A LOT of the Omega Theta Pi fraternity in Animal House , and t

Rush. According to Google, rush referred to the practice of fraternities "rushing" to the train station to meet the members of a college’s freshman class and pinning their fraternity colors on the freshmen to identify them as potential members of that fraternity. OK, that sounds possible. If I remember correctly (and that’s a big “if”), I checked a box somewhere saying I was interested in joining a fraternity, and a few weeks later, I got invited to a mixer hosted by each fr

Anthony and I were friends long before KWC. My family lived next door to his when we were babies, but sometime during my first year, my dad moved us to another neighborhood, so Anthony and I didn’t really know each other. Later, we went to the same junior high and high school, and although we didn’t plan to attend the same college, once we found out, we decided to room together there. On move-in day, I spent hours lining the wall on my side of our dorm room with pages of the

"Dullsville" is on hold for a bit. I'm not happy with the progress so far, and I owe it to my collaborator on the original screenplay and myself to do it right. Serializing it was a bad idea, and painted the story into flimsy boxes that wouldn't hold up. That said, I'll be returning with new stories, and having used up my backlog of previously written tales, they'll be truly original. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

One minute to air, and Bale Dilweg and Angela Kirk sat patiently as the crew finished positioning cameras and adjusting microphones. Well, Angela sat patiently while Dilweg continued trying to talk her into dinner and drinks. The bastard just couldn't take "no" for an answer, even after being shut down on each of his four appearances on her show. "You know, as a Councilman, I can help you move up to the affiliate job in Spokane, or even Seattle if you play your cards right,"

Chapter 1: On the Road (continued) Not even an hour later, and the tickle was already starting up again. Of the many things that arrived with Daphne's pregnancy--morning sickness, insomnia, swollen ankles, tender breasts--the absolute worst for her was the frequent need to urinate. Well, that and the barely concealed judgment she felt from the medical "professionals" when they found out the father was a former circus freak, a real one born without legs. Honestly, Edwin's bi

Author's Note: A little less than 10 years ago, my friend Darryl and I wrote a screenplay submitted it to a competition sponsored by the Sundance Institute. It chronicled the lives of a community of sideshow performers, the essential stars of the traditional circus. Darryl and I wrote with respect; we wanted to show that, despite being ridiculed and considered outsiders, these performers were ordinary people doing their best to overcome physical and financial hardships. We

It’s all about rules. If you follow a few simple rules, you won’t have a problem. The first rule is essential. Don’t ever make it personal. As soon as you know anything more about a subject than who it is or where they’ll be at a given time, you have the potential for it to become personal. And when you take the type of jobs I do, it’s even more important that it never becomes personal. Don’t get me wrong. Know your subject’s habits, what they’re wearing, who they hang with,

It’s his funeral, for God’s sake. I’m supposed to mourn. I’m supposed to cry. I’m supposed to wear black. So I do. I’m doing pretty well, actually. I introduce Jenny as my friend. Those who don’t know better don’t care anyway, and those who know the truth pretend not to. I hear my Aunt Betty, my favorite aunt, whispering to a family friend whom I don’t recognize: “It’s such a shame. I don’t know what could have happened to make her that way. No one else in the family is a ga

I stop the truck in front of Jeri’s house and wait while she walks out and gets in. She smiles a little as she comes out the front door of her pa’s little house, but she looks down at her feet for most of the walk to the truck, so I know something is wrong, or maybe just not right. A breeze out of the west, off the reservation, out of the past, blows Jeri’s long red hair across her cleft chin and cupid’s bow lips, and I remember why I love her. Jeri opens the door of my old

“Is that red tide?” The fat woman in the black one-piece bathing suit was standing in front of me, pointing at the long skeins of dark red seaweed washed up on Turtle Beach by a hurricane far out in the Gulf. Her daughter, a pretty girl of maybe 20 who was not thin but showed few signs of inheriting her mother’s weight, smirked and kept walking. She had succeeded, accidentally, in siccing her mother on an innocent bystander. I was that innocent bystander, but I was in a good

If a guy takes a dump in a museum, is it art? I’m in the lower-level men’s room in the Hirshhorn Museum when this thought occurs to me. After viewing the Warhols (a quadruple self-portrait and umpteen screen prints of Marilyn Monroe’s lips in various colors), several works by Mario Merz (constructions of neon tubes, photographs, and other objects based on Fibonacci sequences), and the ultra-realistic sculptures of Ron Mueck (a super-sized, sullen, hairless man; a just-slight