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The Most Sarcastic Jack-o-Lantern in the World

October 30, 2008 (Thu)

One October, twenty-something years ago, I was a five-year-old boy sitting at the kitchen table staring at a pumpkin. By the end of the night, I would have a jack-o-lantern to call my own. There was no such thing as a child-friendly pumpkin carving knife in the early 1980s, so the most that I was [...]

Ghosts and Goblins and Go-Go Poles

October 27, 2008 (Mon)

I give in. After four years of dating my girlfriend, I’ve come to accept a simple truth: Octobers belong to Diana. Because Halloween is her favorite time of year, Diana always insists on packing our October weekends with Halloween-related activities. We spend a lot of time watching terrible and tedious horror movies, carving pumpkins, shopping [...]

On Being Saved

August 28, 2006 (Mon)

Define salvation. The mind immediately grasps for explanations of the metaphysical, recollections of the mystical, wisps of stardust and Divine refuse, ethereal trails of holy time, thoughts, visions, majestic myths. The Divine. We all have some joker in the sky to blame for our joys and our woes, existence of flesh, the theoretical residence of [...]

The State of Friendship

December 13, 2005 (Tue)

I’ve never been fond of final goodbyes. Everybody always insists on brightening their parting words with lofty optimism and half-hearted promises. It’s a ritualized dance of mutually understood pretense that facilitates graceful exits. To acknowledge the truth is to create opportunities for awkward guilt and self-reflection. And so we lie to our departing friends, and [...]

An Excerpt from My Conversation with God

November 22, 2005 (Tue)

GOD: It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? Whose beliefs are the truest, whose practices are the most pious, and most of all, whose version of God is the most accurate? My answer to you can only be this: as in all other things relating to humanity, there is a common thread that unites [...]

The Office Newbie

October 20, 2005 (Thu)

You know you spend too much time on the internet when you make a mistake at work, and you spend the rest of the day dreading that your boss will descend upon your desk and scream, “What the hell, you fucking n00b?” I shit you not. Those are the kinds of thoughts that I’m forced [...]

Bee My Queen, Honey Bird

March 25, 2005 (Fri)

I’ve never understood why so many people choose to euphemize sex by referring to it as “the birds and the bees.” Due to common usage, we all know what it means when somebody invokes that phrase. But standing alone on its own merits, the “the birds and the bees” is an embarrassingly ill-constructed analogy. What [...]