The summer of 1984 was a fun time to be alive. Sure, we all thought the USSR was going to bomb the bejeezus out of us—and they were thinking the same thing about us—but movies like The Day After notwithstanding, there was more to life that year than the looming specter of World War III. During that summer, the music world saw the issue of Prince’s Purple Rain, Sammy Hagar’s VOA (it was no Standing Hampton, but it was still a good album), and Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. It was the summer of killer movies, too, marking the releases of The Last Starfighter, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and Ghostbusters. It was a grand time for…
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The Truth is Somewhere: The Continuing Adventures of an X-Files Junkie
It was 1993, and I was twenty-eight years old, still single, and living in student housing in southern Alabama. I was about to complete a bachelor’s degree with no real plans of what to do once that came to pass. One option was to keep working at the local airport and pursue my commercial pilot rating, the other to continue on to graduate school to get a degree I could actually use. Neither of those life choices seemed appealing at the time, mostly because my late twenties were to me what the teens are to normal folks: my formative years. Problem was, in those days, I couldn’t feign interest in anything…
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Across the Table from David Sedaris
This piece was originally written in November, 2016 and first published on US Represented. Friday before last, I went to see David Sedaris read at the Center for the Performing Arts in Denver. For those who don’t know, Sedaris is an American author, humorist, and radio contributor best known for his delightfully skewed slice-of-life essays and articles about his family and life abroad. Going in, I hadn’t been sure whether Sedaris would be doing a signing that evening or not, so I was happy to find out that I’d be able to get him to sign a book. Hopping up from my seat, I clambered over my wife, friends, and…
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The Longest Day
During our fourth week of U.S. Navy boot camp, we found ourselves in the service of the mess hall. The navy called it Service Week, and we’d been warned about it for the previous three weeks. Everyone said it would be a sweet little piece of hell made up of the most interminable days imaginable. To the carefree civilian, we were told, eight weeks in boot camp might seem like nothing, but to the recruit, Service Week was like a month of decades. Still, we wondered if what we’d been told about Service Week was just another example of our collective leg being pulled. Getting a break from being berated…
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Howard Odentz’s Bottle Toss: An Unpredictable, Creepy Ride
Back in the ancient days of 2013, I came across a book called Dead (A Lot), from an unknown (to me) writer and playwright named Howard Odentz. This was during the salad days of AMC’s adaptation of The Walking Dead, so everyone who was anyone was writing about zombies, and a lot of the stories in the undead zeitgeist were cut from that pattern. That’s not to suggest they were all boring and derivative, but there just weren’t many that were interesting. I was skeptical. With Dead (A Lot), though, Odentz managed to produce something clever and unique, a zombie story unlike any I’d ever read. Since then, I’ve done…
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What Started as a Review of an Autobiography but Became a Piece About My Life with the Music of Bruce Springsteen
Though I love their music, I was too young to experience The Beatles firsthand. For that, I depended on older relatives to school me. I was five when Let it Be came out, so although I remember singing along to the title track and “The Long and Winding Road” with my Aunt Lois and her friends, I wasn’t old enough to appreciate either of those songs or The Fab Four’s musical genius until a few years later. Fortunately, I was a bit more lined up time-wise with Bruce Springsteen. I was ten when Born to Run released, though I remember loving the title track but not noticing much else about…
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Stranger Things and the Value of a Well-Flawed Character
Recently, I’ve read a few of the “We Need to Talk About Hopper” articles dealing with Stranger Things‘ Jim Hopper’s “problematic” qualities. Some of those pieces, I think, are designed to be clickbait–along the lines of the “Why Are Characters Smoking in Stranger Things?” and “Those Kids Need to Wear Helmets When They Ride Their Bikes” articles–but this sort of discussion always fascinates me because a large portion of my job is talking meaningfully about stories and the characters who populate them. Here’s the simplified version of that argument: Police Chief Jim Hopper is problematic because he’s angry and unruly and he drinks and smokes too much. He has Schlitz…
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Another Navy Story: Old Milwaukee, Tighty Whities, and the Music of Bruce Springsteen
When I was in U.S. Navy A School, I knew a guy named Walter. In many ways, Walter was an average late-teen-to-early-twenties navy recruit: homesick, restless, impulsive, and far too immature to be taking on any significant responsibility. That was all of us in those days. Unfortunately, Walter was also prone to getting drunk and inexplicably winding up in his underwear. I’m sure there were a lot of steps between Walter’s descents into drunkenness and the shedding of his outerwear, but none of us knew what they were because we never went out with him. We were young and stupid, and we were known to enjoy a beer or five,…
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Finding Happiness in What You Carry: A Bit About Mother’s Day
If you ask me, most holidays are much ado without any substance. Take Valentine’s Day. If you aren’t some kind of jerk, you’ve probably been halfway nice to the person you claim to love above all others. If that’s not the case, dinner and chocolate isn’t going to suddenly set it right. Despite soft-focus commercials about exotic weekend getaways and advice about the portion of one’s salary suitable for purchasing jewelry items, Valentine’s Day could just as well be called, I don’t know, Tuesday. How about Christmas? Whether we’re talking about its Christian or pagan origins, it’s hard to see how any of what happens today relates to any of…
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Snow Day
The whicker of wind outside my window tells me leaving the haven of my bed would be a mistake. No breakfast eaten or new day begun, no matter how delicious or auspicious, can contend with the loving press of a flannel sheet or the promised rush of anesthetic joy. Dreams pull me down, promising one more and one more and one more minute of bliss. So I stay.
