A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
A song that really resonated with me toward the end of 2022 was Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December,” probably because one of my testicles almost didn’t. I woke up one morning early in the month with pain emanating from ol’ Lefty. When the issue persisted for a day or so, I went […]
Shouldn’t Michelangelo’s David be circumcised? After all, the biblical king depicted in the statue was pretty famously Jewish—a hero of the faith, in fact, ranking up there with Moses and whoever invented bagels. Yet Michelangelo sculpted a Gentile foreskin for his David. It’s almost as though we can’t trust 16th-century European Christians to represent those […]
To tell you the truth, I don’t really mind the oniony smell of human sweat. I mean, I wouldn’t buy a Yankee Candle in that flavor or anything. But B.O. doesn’t spark the level of disgust in me that it seems to set off in others. I take this as proof of my high regard […]
Sometimes I think it’s a shame I didn’t live in an era before modern orthodontics. I have naturally occurring straight teeth—no medical intervention went into the making of my smile—and I figure that back in pre-braces times this feature would have made me stand out, godlike, among the snaggletoothed masses. Of course, those days were […]
Pablo Picasso’s 1934 painting Deux personnages (La Lecture) depicts two young women reading, sexily. The figure on the left is the painter’s lover and muse at the time, Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he had met when she was 17 and he was 45 and married to somebody else. The other personnage in the picture is one of Marie-Thérèse’s […]
A few years ago, an editor of the pop-culture site Consequence of Sound asked me to participate in a then-monthly, now-defunct feature where writers contributed personal essays inspired by the tracks of a classic rock album. It was a different album each month, and a different writer was assigned to each track. I wrote a […]
Indirect Objects 