A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
My first out-of-town travel-writing assignment after getting hired by Frommer’s in 2016 involved a tour of New Zealand. Talk about setting the bar high. And speaking of heights, bungee jumping was supposed to be part of the trip. Though I considered going over the brink, I ultimately decided not to, owing to some deficit of […]
I threw up at a Tastee-Freez when I was 6 or so. My family would sometimes go there after Sunday night church. That’s right: On Sundays, there were services in the morning and in the evening, and we went to both, presumably because the internet hadn’t been invented yet and we were hard up for […]
At this point, having CDs is like Christianity: so passé it’s embarrassing. Nevertheless, I’ve hung onto a bunch of my CDs. For that matter, I still practice Christianity. Though I stream music like everybody else nowadays, I appreciate a CD’s tidy square packaging, the little booklet of song lyrics that’s often included, and the finite […]
My father taught me to shave by handing me a Norelco. That was the extent of his instruction. I rubbed the buzzing thing over my face until the fuzz was gone, and thus was I initiated into a timeless rite of manhood. I don’t know how electric razors work, but it feels like they yank […]
For most of my adulthood, my weight has been an unwavering 158 pounds. Recently, the number has begun to creep higher, presumably due to my slowing metabolism and not any changes to my diet or fitness routine. After all, altering those things never had an impact before. Lord knows I tried. In my mid-twenties, I […]
There are those who seem to have boundless confidence in the greatness of their home states. Such people usually come from Texas or California. The unhesitating state pride strikes me as unearned in one of those cases, but I’m too polite to get specific. I come from Arkansas, which inspires more complicated feelings, especially in […]
Virgil can supposedly tell you the future. You just open the poet’s works at random, point a finger, and voilà. There’s your fortune. Several years ago, I attempted this method of divination—known as the Virgilian lottery or the Sortes Virgilianae if you want to get insufferable about it—and landed on one of the passages in […]
Indirect Objects 