Category: essay
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Homeless Assistance — How to solve the housing crisis
I seldom write about our nonprofit work on here for various reasons, but I want to talk about homeless assistance and how to solve the homeless crisis with faithful love. For eight years or so, we’ve hosted monthly salons at our house as a maker’s day. We’ve done it every Third Saturday. If you’re in…
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Fart Proudly by Benjamin Franklin
Editor’s Note: Fart Proudly or A Letter to a Royal Academy about farting or To the Royal Academy of Farting was a response by Benjamin Franklin to the academic societies of the time that were, if you’ll excuse me, up their own ass. We’re publishing Fart Proudly in our long tradition of Dead Guest Posts…
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How can I road trip like Steinbeck Travels with Charley?
You know how in my reviews of LJ’s novel and FC’s novel both, I talked about how I feel like I owe people all the time? How I feel horrible when I don’t read a friend’s book? That goes double for books I’m gifted. That — I am delighted to say — was not the case for…
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Cussing and Kissing Because of all the Things You’ve Done
Saturday; October 8th 2022: Zionist in Tehran literally means someone who is the cruelest. “They’re all zionists boy, worse than Zionism. Look at them; they’re tall.” An old man got close to me and whispered with malice. I mocked him. “Be very careful.” he answered: “cause we need you — all the young — healthy…
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The End of the Salad Days
“Please go,” said the man in the tie, ushering us out through the automatic doors. Shuffling nearby were two checked out looking cops; the supermarket manager evidently feeling a possibility of violent protest from the old man and me. Without making a scene, we left and crossed the sprawling parking lot to the Volvo ‘88…
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Bad Intellectual: The Houellebecqian Case of Catherine Perez-Shakdam
Alors, les Français sont en train de flatter l’islam bien.Sadegh Hedayat Once, one of the Iranian politicians in the Parliament of Iran during his speech accounted a brief conversation with arteshbod Hossein Fardoust, some years after 1979. Fardoust was a friend of Shah and one of the most influential figures of SAVAK—in the last meeting…
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On the Spirit of a Racehorse
Twenty thoroughbreds line up at the starting gate of the Kentucky Derby, stamping with impatience, leaning forward pulling the bits out of their mouths, unwilling to yield their heads to their jockeys. The two and three year colts and fillies, since the moment they were weaned and introduced to the saddle’s girth squeezing…
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8 Weeks
ONE – October 3 Late-summer flowers are almost gone. Phlox, brown-eyed susans, the delicate, weedy daisies that no one can bear to pull up by the roots—all of these have begun to fade. The herbs in the garden behind the Quadrangle Club, too, are dying. Picking basil, I find each straight stem beginning…
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Everything Is Stripped These Days
Peeled away to the bare core. Everything is inside and shrunken. All I see and hear and think is only what I touch. And taste has nothing to do with any of it. I’m tasteless. What I mean is, I’m not ill but still this virus has me in its grip. The world…
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A Matter of Imaginary Space
I was asleep the very first time I crossed an international border. Sometime between the thirteen hours of existing in a plane, I had gone past the Atlantic Ocean and into Europe, landing in France on a foggy and uncertain morning. I was rushed out of an airplane into the sterile no-land of…
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Our Work Here Is Done
Not long ago, I went shoe shopping with our daughter Katherine. It was a spontaneous outing, which is unusual for me because I am no longer a spontaneous man. I don’t shuffle my playlist, I don’t keep golf clubs in my trunk, and I don’t cross roads without a walk signal. I plan for…
