Month: May 2018

I lived in the basement of a bare-bulb Midtown Kansas City apartment building. My place qualified as one of those dim dwellings landlords build into the bowels of their buildings to squeeze the last dimes out their real estate. It had two rooms, a front room with a kitchenette and…

True story: One Saturday in spring 2011, I was in the basement tying a knot in a rope to hang myself. Son Nick called to me from the living room, changing everything. He literally saved my neck. Furious Gazelle, a sprightly literary magazine, has published the account of my suicide.…

Henry Fontaine Jackson wanted to see the world in black and white. No furniture. No Audrey Hepburn.   He dreamed of emptiness.   If that vision was Spartan, it was by design. Lack of foresight complicated everything. Even if he looked lived like a twenty-year-old dope smoker with a job…

Ween. Today I replaced the word “weed” with the word “ween.” Who knows why I did it. It’s a sort of Zippy the Pinhead thing I’ve got going every now and then. The word appeared in my head before I even got out of bed. It kept going round and…

The end of the semester always portends disaster. Like everyone, teachers and students, about mid-semester, things just seem to slow down. Mired in intellectual and psychic syrup, we slog through, hoping that just around the corner, there will be a light, however dim. It will show us the way. The…