Entries
The Dictator's Ringtone (a short story)
If I Make it to Eleven (a short story)
Today I’m finally gonna do it. I’m gonna kill Frank, my stepfather. It’s exactly thirty days since I decided I had to, before he kills Jackie first. Jackie’s my little brother, and he’s not even three yet, and you can’t …
The Early Daze, Part 21 (the final chapter)
The Early Daze, Part 20
In a state of beer plus antihistamine, on a stomach empty as a dry tank, I wrote my monologue in a wired and woozy day/night burst. My government arts grant/unemployment would not go entirely to waste. It was the rant …
The Early Daze, Part 19
The Early Daze, part 18
The Early Daze, part 17
The Early Daze, part 16
Tommy left the TV on his desk the entire week, and it was tuned to the war every second. Orders were down, the days dragged, and we all found ourselves watching that violent screen more than we should have. It …
The Early Daze, part 15
The Early Daze, part 14
The Early Daze, part 13
The Early Daze, part 12
The Early Daze, part 11
“What’s up, Cool Daddy-O?!” Tommy, the shipping/receiving clerk, gave me the nickname during my first week at M.G. Electric. Long hair plus goatee equaled Cool Daddy-O. And it stuck. “How much acid did you drop this weekend, Cool Daddy-O?” “Cool …
The Early Daze, part 10
As I sat across the desk from him, squinting through the fumes of his Tanqueray and tater-tots lunch at the strip club, M.G. Electric co-founder Frank Moe looked over my application with a subtle frown, which concerned me, littered as …
The Early Daze, part 9
The Early Daze, part 8
The Early Daze, part 7
When J and Quinn moved in together late in the summer of 1990, my time on Ward Road was over, but I chose (for reasons chain-bound to my barely functional, first-love induced, emotional retardation) to stay in San Diego for …
The Early Daze, part 6
The Early Daze, part 5
The Early Daze, part 4
It’s odd to think of how much different it was looking for a job twenty years ago. For decades, millennia perhaps, job hunting went largely unchanged. In the summer of 1989 you still read through the want-ads in a real …