Recent Stories

Selected Blog Posts

Patsy Cline and the Paddle

December 2015

Patsy Cline, in today's parlance, gave zero fucks. I feel a certain kinship to Cline, if only because I attended the same school she did, Gore Elementary, 12 miles west of Winchester, Virginia (though I attended 30 years after she did). Back up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, Gore is a tiny unincorporated town, mostly a few buildings coalescing around a single road breaking off Route 50. Many of the refined folk in the nearby metropolis of sorts, Winchester, had looked down on Patsy Cline, as being from the wrong side of the tracks, even after she became famous. Click to See the Tracks She Was on the Wrong Side Of...

Liquor in the Front, Poker in the Rear

November 2018

Some dirty truths about running a newspaper:I am sorry to hear of the passing of the Village Voice, and for, my own kindred, the Baltimore City Paper, both of which folded last year. But I am pretty cynical about attempts to revive them. Quarter-page ads from the local coffee shops were not what drove those newspapers. My advice for anyone foolhardy to try to start an actual print newspaper or magazine these days? Find a source of dirty money to keep the books healthy. Click to Read More...

The Path to Totality

April 2018

I would not recommend driving 1,400 miles in approximately 30 hours. But if you must do it, it helps to have a speedy set of wheels. Our goal was to experience the eclipse in its entirety, to get under the path of totality as its darkness cut a swath across the United States mid-day August 21, 2017. Others had made plans, procured camping spots and sleeping bags for the night before. We had a Ford Mustang to get us there, and get us back, through a 30 hour day all in order to experience the 3 minute micro-day of pure planetary discombobulation within. Click to See...

Friends of John Sargent

August 2015

Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray remained young while his portrait aged in an attic. John Sargent (1856-1925), in a way, pulled off the opposite trick, preserving on oiled canvas the full beauty and animism of people who are now all long deceased. Sargent painted portraits of his friends, often trading a payment for freedom of artistic direction, which allowed him to more accurately capture their personalities. Tight with Claude Monet, Sargent often borrowed techniques from impressionism to make his work more dynamic and subtle. The results remain almost eerily vivacious over a century later. Click to See

Better Life Through Medicine

April 2000

As a teenage fuck-up who had recently (and barely) graduated high school, I, of limited opportunities, joined the U.S. Army in the summer of 1983. I had never been outside the northeast U.S., and after advanced training, was first assigned to Fort Lee, New Jersey. Cool, I thought, I would be close to my girlfriend, who lived not too far away in Harrisburg, Pa. But then, in would I would later understand to be in true U.S. Army fashion, a last minute phone call came in: I would be instead be dispatched to South Korea, a place that seemed for my lovelorn heart to be on the other side of the planet. Click to See

Darwin by the Fire

July 2014

Sometimes a piece of writing so closely describes the truth, that it itself becomes the truth. Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," first published in 1859, made its argument so thoroughly, so absolutely, it literally willed evolution into being in the human consciousness. Click to Read More...