Category: Before Living in NYC
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Daddy Issues are Overrated
When my dad hooked back up with the babysitter he’d originally cheated on mom with, my siblings and I didn’t hear from him for a month. I was eating at a Texas barbecue joint a block from Times Square when that carpenter and millwright finally returned all of my ignored calls. I paced in the…
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Dad is Good at Rearing Domestic Animals
One thing that seems so strange in retrospect is how many animals came through our home and therefore how good Dad was at rearing domestic animals. Now and again, I grew jealous of them, but I cannot deny that, generally speaking, my father was really good at rearing animals. I had, much like a halfling…
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Dad is Good at Welcoming Everyone
Dad had a lot of flaws when it came to making and keeping friends, but he always seemed to me to be great at welcoming everyone or at least early on he greeted everyone with a spirit of welcome that he shied away from in later years. My mother early on did the equivalent of…
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Dad is Good at Truck Maintenance
In that house on Circle Drive, the garage pulled into the basement where dad did truck maintenance. It’s funny because I remember that. And I remember the upstairs, the porch, the attic, my room. My memory is almost entirely blank on my parents room unless it was the one that had the green textured paint.…
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Dad is Good at Demon Hunting
Some of my relatives have always taken an interest in demon hunting stories, but in practice it seems my dad had a… different approach to it. I won’t mention who. However, I will say that sometimes it seems an over interest in power and control comes hand in hand with an over interest in the…
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Dad is Good at the Basics of Life
But there in the house that pierced the hill on circle drive, I learned the basics of life. Dad is good and taught me that sometimes there’s no other cure for pain but the hard break. He offered to pull my teeth with pliers, to tie a string to a door and slam it shut.…
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Dad is Good at the Giant Conspiracy
My dad, among others, affirmed the big family. And sometimes this meant speaking of the giant conspiracy. This includes the people you despise, you realize. If family’s big enough, you start to think of yourself as a part of the brotherhood of mankind. The founder of my alma mater, which was a small liberal arts…
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Dad is Good at Redefining Family
In secret soon before my father died, I was writing a memoir about him called Dad is Good. In it, I refused to talk about the daddy issues I mention elsewhere. I resolved only to talk about the qualitative goods of fatherhood in general, of my father in specific. To him. Then he died stupid…
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Run to Hardware Store NYC
We wanted to show you guys what a run to the hardware store NYC is like. This is me and my father in law buying a few boards on a rainy day a week from Christmas.
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Mouse in Apartment NYC vs Flying Roach NYC
As I asked a couple emails back, what did our friends’s — elder artists’s — patrons enjoy the most over their tenure? Honest tales of life in the marketplace. Sometimes we focus so much on production that we forget to tell an honest, “Here’s what life’s really like in NYC” kind of story. So why not compare…
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Before Living in NYC series
Often I divert conversations from questions about living in NYC because even mentioning living here, you get judged. Conservatives outside NYC judge you as a liberal elitist. Liberal elitists judge you as a poser conservative who didn’t grow up here. NYC conservatives judge you as not war-hardened enough and liberals outside the city judge you…