Perspective

Take a look at what's happening in the world around you. Go on, take a look at it. Pretty bleak, huh? No wonder all those Japanese kids are killing themselves. In troubled times, it's easy to just throw your hands up in disgust and say, "Well, I give up," and let yourself be sucked into the downward spiral in which the world is seemingly headed. But before getting caught up in all that gloom and doom stuff, it's important to take things into perspective. Are we really headed in the wrong direction? Are things really getting worse? I used to think so, right up until this morning. The elevators at the Prudential Tower have little video screens...

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The Legend of Johnny Bingo

When the Bossman rations out the weekly wages, sometimes I wonder if he truly knows the dedication to the craft that emanates from the very souls of his ever-diligent employees. (The number printed on the rightmost corner of the check would suggest a resounding "No.") Yet so dedicated are we, so devoted to keeping our minds limber, that we spend what lesser men would consider an obscene amount of time playing online Scrabble. What better way to keep your mind fresh and wary of common misspellings--a veritable career-ender in the fast-paced world of typesetting--then to partake in a friendly four-player intra-office game of Scrabble? But the...

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Ask A Stupid Question...

Okay, suppose you're walking down the street, minding your own business, when a guy comes up to you and says, "See that guy over there? He likes to shove fish down his pants." Your immediate reaction would be that the guy that stopped you on the street wasn't right in the head. But then you start thinking, "What if that guy really does shove fish down his pants? Nah, he can't. That's too ridiculous. But still..." And you just can't stop thinking about it. Does the guy standing on the other side of the street really stick haddock down his pants for reasons known only to him? He looks like a normal enough guy, but you'd never even seen him until...

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One Lump Or Two?

Until I met Michele I never drank much tea. I liked the little cups they give you at the fancier Chinese food restaraunts, but that was about it. I wasn't really aware that tea came in all kinds of ridiculous flavors, and now I've been drinking it more and more. Which is a good thing, because I like coffee, but I can't drink it very often or I end up spending all night rushing in and out of the bathroom. I swear, it's like the Friday the 13th movies; the first one is genuinely scary, followed by a seemingly endless line of progressively sloppy sequels. Tuesday night I put the water on to make a cup. I asked if anybody else wanted anything, but...

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Pantsless: A Story of Courage and Survival

Twenty-eight years ago, under a shady mango tree in Guatemala, a man sold a mystic green "fertility" rock to a gullible tourist. Elsewhere, newborn Jose Julian Sarti Gil lay in his crib, swaddled in a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt. Today, Jose is an important, if not overly enthusiastic, cog in the well-tuned machine that is the Borders bookstore empire. And the tourist? He was probably attacked by a gang of armed robbers in Tikal. In celebration of Jose's birth, I offer the following story, as told by the man of the hour himself. It was January 15, 1998. I was returning home from a holiday trip to Guatemala. Since it was 75 degrees there and I'd...

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One More

My mom emailed me at work yesterday about my last post. She asked if my life was really that bad in high school. It wasn't, really. I can look back now and see it's just part of growing up. I liked a girl, she didn't like me. It happens. But aside from the silly repressed feelings and self-destructive unrequited love business, life was pretty good. As for the poems, Memories and But I Do were the only "serious" ones I did. I intentionally mixed them in with the rest, which were infused with my own dark humor, (at least that was the idea) to sort of throw people off track of what was really going on in my head. But just to ease my mom's mind,...

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