The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer. Humans are social animals. We only make sense to ourselves in a larger context, and we spend the years of our lives trying to surround ourselves with good or interesting people, sometimes both. But the world is large and diffuse. The best people are scattered to the wind, like […]

The View from the Top of the Creative High Dive. Even if you’ve been doing your thing for a good long time, you have these moments where you wonder if you can pull it off again. Like you start a story or a painting with a bright and crystal clear idea, and in the back […]

Beyond Cracked. Even the most unserious athlete occasionally overdoes it. If you’re like us, then sometimes you even overdo overdoing it. Maybe you’ve been there, dead in the saddle, dehydrated, cramped, contemplating your imminent death, praying for it even. And then you drink a full gas coke and feel much better. Music pick of the […]

Everything Louder Than Everything Else. Everything and everyone is competing for your attention. What most people don’t realize is that they’re ALSO competing for their own attention. What are we losing? How are we fighting back? Or are we all just blithely accepting that our minds are no longer our own? Music pick of the […]

Despite Our Best Intentions. A well-adjusted human being likely thrives due to a set of positive daily habits that support their physical, mental and emotional wellness. Most of us have a good idea what those habits are. Most of us find reasons, almost every day, not to do them. Music pick of the week: Robot […]

The Nine Ball Chronicles. Society is organized around the idea that people’s brains work a certain way, even though we all know some extremely large percentage of people have brains that different ways work sometimes. It’s like your dungeon master only likes clerics and doesn’t care at all about bards or druids. I mean c’mon! […]

Forgiveness and Hope Are the Primary Elements of Time Travel. We can’t change the past without forgiveness. We can’t change the future without hope. We can’t send you to back in time to kill Hitler, or other people like Hitler, but maybe we can all change our relationships to the parts of the timeline we […]

Being a Part of the Scene, Apart from the Scene. The older you get, the more of your friends skip the show, because they’re tired, their back hurts, and frankly they just can’t stand in one place for very long. As a result, you find yourself standing in a crowd of seemingly random people, united […]

Run-Ins with Authority, Part II. Apparently, we’ve had enough problems with the man that it takes more than one episode to get through it all. If you’ve spent a lifetime being told to sit still, we suspect you have some stories yourself. You’re just one of those people, like us, who struggles to do what […]

Run-Ins with Authority. We were young and surly and had a really hard time sitting still. You know who hates that? The man. Sometimes it was a man in a uniform with a gun on his hip. Sometimes it was our Algebra teacher. Sometimes it was our very tired and overworked parents. You get the […]