A Brief History: A view of sexual ethics today

I’ll never force my way past the walls of a girl’s pseudo-moral denials of pleasure.

On mothers and teachers

When I wasn’t playing outside pretending to be my dad, I was playing with blocks. Any sort of blocks would do but mostly Legos. I would make towers, airplanes, and spaceships. I created new vehicles and weapons, and invented things without names. One day I decided to let a girl play blocks with me. She was wearing heavy bangs in the mid-eighties fashion. She wore a puffy white dress with thick shoulder pads. I don’t remember if we were friends. I don’t remember seeing her before or after the incident.

Starbucks: The third place

“I need—” But do I really want to do this to her, to rely on Ashley when I don’t know how things are going to go with Sarah, when I can’t even pin down my feelings for a girl I just met at work, not to mention the girl I’ve loved for four years? Do I really want to be that asshole?

Brody: A moment in anarchy

When I sat down on some steps outside the pool gate, Brody seemed genuinely unfazed by the incident. He nuzzled against my hand with his nose and sat down in the grass next to me. Maybe he could tell the crazy had left me. Maybe the isolation had driven him as crazy as me. I wrote about betrayal. I wrote about how I had beaten Brody for things that were mostly my fault. I wrote about how I had never lost control of my emotions like that.

Why William Gibson’s _The Gernsback Continuum_ was right

We’ve never recovered from FDR's attempt at systematic control. You see a few gasps here and there at the sort of fun we used to have in this country. We had Woodstalk. We had Orson Welles. Russ Meyer cranked out movies in the 60s and gang banging people into the theaters with promises of topless women. Drive ins showed movies with names like Kiss Me Deadly, which is an amazing movie (go see it!), and Mondo Topless (not so much).

Pneumonia: Episode one

Turning back to the window, I shivered under my comforter. My head never settled down, never stopped spinning, never stopped aching. I had class today, my last class before Thanksgiving Break, before going home to my family. I banged my head against the wall instead. I wanted to fracture the skull, the see pieces of it sliding down the beige blocks. I wanted to see the cold, malevolent wall painted in my blood and bone. I didn’t even manage to bruise myself, didn’t even chafe the dry skin. I was too weak.

Beginning blogging and WordPress.com tips and tricks

I've been pleasantly surprised that even though my readership is small, several readers have asked how to make a website like mine. I'm going to charitably assume you mean my blog, which is what you're reading, and not my temporarily abandoned website. Therefore, here's a post about choices I've made, research I've stumbled upon, and hacks I've created. I will start with the most rudimentary information, since it's what has been requested, and move on to the more difficult work and choices.

What we talk about when we talk about the economy

On the way home, we discussed for the first time not how to make ends meet but what to do with the extra money. We splurged on sandwiches at The Federalist, an expense we could finally afford. Our relationship was filled with expenses we couldn't afford; clothes at the Goodwill to keep her in good spirits, a brownie for me with lunch, a personal-sized French press for her to use at work, a Virgil's rootbeer to make my nights a little sweeter. A trip to New York when she just couldn't stand Boston's rain anymore, and a trip to the North End when both of us just wanted out of town. We couldn't afford a dime of it, and yet somehow all our money came together. That night, we discussed Harry Potter; we should buy tickets before they sell out. We didn't; they sold out.

Everybody Panic! Six reasons to read "The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think"

A steady erosion of confidence in the stimulus bill is occuring because the happy-happy joy-joy news is vastly at odds with what is occurring in the United States, and it's only a matter of time before people will see that. I wouldn't put it past you political types to have foreseen that the charade was wearing thin, making your aggressive coming-clean with the American people a political ploy so that the WSJ could be the first mainstream media to report of monkies throwing feces. Well, congratulations, I guess.

Manager, a character sketch

And here I am. I can’t distract myself from my employees’ fates without the truth of my own progression breaking my concentration and ruining the numb experience of it all. At home, I can’t pick a show to watch, and when I do settle I pay it little attention or far too much. I’ve stopped sleeping well. I get little to nothing out of it, the six to eight hours dwindling away regardless of their productivity. My dreams haunt me.