Category Archives: My Past

One for the Little Twerp

So I’m currently reading Driving Like Crazy, the newest book by P.J. O’Rourke, the funniest man in the world1. In one of the later chapters in this book, which is a collection of his automotive writing, he refers to a young police officer who tickets him for speeding as a “Twerp.” And the word sent [...]

Sixteen Things About My Father

Some of my Facebook friends have recently posted some Father’s Day thoughts that were more ache than memory – accounts of absentee fathers, dads who were never there, dads who didn’t care. It makes me realize all the more how blessed I was to have the father I had for the time that I had [...]

What I Have Learned from Keeping Fish

I’m slowly getting back into keeping tropical fish again. I just restocked the betta vase in my day job office with a Crowntail Betta1, and on my bookcase is an Eclipse 6 aquarium that I’m slowly setting up to house a few White Clouds and Guppies. If the bug of my youth returns as a [...]

My Baby’s On the Other Side of the World and Other Stories

1. My Baby’s On the Other Side of the World. It’s not my wife or girlfriend baby. It’s my youngest child. And she really is on the other side of the world, 14 time zones away1 in Siberia. Actually, she’s in what is called “Far East Russia,” but we all say “Siberia” because people give [...]

Mister Engineer Man

Thirty-one years ago this month, I walked onto the campus of a college and met with an adviser, who asked me what I wanted to do for a living. And I told him that I wanted to be a recording engineer. I wanted to work in a recording studio, recording and mixing albums for different [...]

Scary Monsters

More fodder from my friend Scoob, spinning off of an e-mail discussion we were having about comic books part of which was referenced here. Only this part of the conversation has to do with fear. Namely, things that scared me as a child. Growing up in the 1960′s was a fairly idyllic time, at least [...]

Vinyl

Once upon a time, music came on black vinyl discs 12 inches across (okay, there were other sizes and other colors of vinyl, but stay with me here – I’m writing for atmosphere). This vinyl was fragile, more fragile than CD’s, and the very act of playing them wore them out because they had grooves [...]

Miles and Miles of Files Part V: The One-Shot Gag and the Amateur Director

The bit first, and then the story behind it. I saw this really swell movie on late night TV last night that I wanted to tell you about. It was an Italian made gangster movie from about 1968. This head of a dope ring is at a casino in Luxembourg or someplace like that when [...]

Miles and Miles of Files Part IV: Little Folks

Now here’s something I dredged up from my cartooning days – rather, the tail end of them, because I haven’t really done anything but work-related brainstorming sketches in the last ten years. And it’s been probably 15 since I’ve done any cartooning. Anyway, I used to get ideas like this all of the time, and [...]

Miles and Miles of Files Part II: An Adventure with Joe and Tom and David

It’s a shame they don’t make Big Chief Tablets anymore. That soft, brown tinted paper (“that still had chunks of wood in it” – Bill Cosby) was, in current buzzwords, optimized for the ball point pen, so even if you had a common as muck Bic medium, you still got the ultimate writing experience. Too [...]

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