Virginia was the bad girl…the junior high bad girl who occupied a special niche in school culture. There could only be one Virginia because it took such unbelievable balls to be the junior high school bad girl, so nearly all the other girls fell back into their familiar roles of ‘unpopular’, ‘popular’, ‘pretty and...
Read more »
It’s odd that on this particular Father’s Day, after feeling the short-shrift the majority of my life, I’m strangely released from the sadness of my paternal upbringing (if you can even call it that). Maybe I’ve just hashed the living prose out of it so much that I’ve set free some of those demons...
Read more »
With each passing hour, I get more protective of my time and, more precisely, how other people sometimes waste it. I do not like this from anyone but from dysfunctional family members it nearly turns me criminal. Time wasted dealing with the narcissistic, selfish meanderings of knee-jerk, neurotic control freaks is taking its toll...
Read more »
When we’re young our thought processes don’t include much personal maintenance. Youth doesn’t have to think about eventual degradation because, for the most part, every thing’s in working order and body parts can still take a fair amount of abuse without something falling off and rolling across the floor. This is the magic of...
Read more »
For the most part, I do not understand any families that I’m associated with. They often seem like foreign countries with agendas and a language that is, well, foreign to me. They hide things from me that they think I shouldn’t know or create attributes for themselves that they don’t possess so that they...
Read more »
After years of assessing my strengths and weaknesses, there’s no doubt I’m a highly distractable person. What would that be in today’s coded vernacular…HDP? I’m sure if I were in high school now, psychologists would be breaking it all down into a neat little prescription to be filled at the pharmacy but all it...
Read more »
I don’t think I ever quite got the worth of Kindergarten. Back in 1956, pre-school hadn’t been created and kindergarten was the launching pad for your school years. Most of the kids in my class were discovering the wonders of their newfound social circle, while others were simply enthralled with their own boogers or...
Read more »
My dad (father #2) loved the grandiosity of staged illusion and made it a major part of his performing repertoire. When he spoke of the history of magic and magicians it was with great reverence for the craft and he worked hard to hone his own skills so that they were a worthy contribution...
Read more »
With the recent passing of my step-dad (father #3, more on him later), the inevitable barrage of morbid thoughts have been pouring into my brain. I’ve also ratcheted up my macabre humor to previously unheard of levels but that is how I’m personally dealing with his death. Everybody’s got their way. So for the...
Read more »
I’ve always had a problem with cliques; the little exclusionary groupings that insulate people from one another for, usually, superficial reasons. Cliques are most common in school settings, even through college (although they’re usually on the wane there) and, hopefully, by the time a person enters the real world, these things are gone for...
Read more »
