Road trips, once long ago in my flat, dusty Delaware boyhood, held a special, almost spiritual promise. Getting away — to the beach, to the mountains, on vacation, to Arizona as a young man, just anywhere, really — was everything to me. It was the stuff of Springsteen (Together we can break this trap/We’ll run… Read More A Trip
Side-stepping the septic tank that is American politics these days is nearly impossible. You can pretend not to notice its existence, you can try to whistle your way past a lot of the stink and unpleasantness, but basically ignoring what’s going on in this world, in this country, right here, right now … well, in… Read More Six Weeks Out
Napkins, I have come to learn over the past few months, are the secret to a good in-vehicle eating experience. Tons of them. As many as the hard-working masked woman (maybe man?) at the little window behind the Plexiglas shield will hand over. The sad fact is, you can’t not make at least a little… Read More The Art of Eating In
Four months into the coronavirus crisis, and four tortuous months until the next presidential election, I’m beginning to wonder whether we’ll make it to next weekend. Every day, every hour, every fricking minute these days is a slog. Everything is a battle. Everybody’s mad. Whaddya say — just spitballing here — that we all self-isolate… Read More Everybody’s Mad
These times that we live in — these, right here, right now — are extraordinary, aren’t they? I’m old enough (quiet, already!) to have lived through a half-dozen wars, a president being assassinated (c’mon, I was a baby), a couple of other ones being shot at, the first moon landing, the fall of the Berlin… Read More Our Times
Years from now, when we’re squeezed hip-to-hip into a stadium somewhere, or we’re side-shouldering our way through a party, or jammed into a vestibule waiting to be seated at a noisy restaurant, these past few months will be little more than a gauzy, annoying tic in our collective minds, to be brushed away and left… Read More Quarantine Reflections
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