Ernest Hemingway, Mary Poppins, Julius Kelp and Henry Jekyll walk into a bar.¹ Hemingway does what he’s been doing since before you got here and orders a whiskey and soda. The bartender points to the top shelf but is shooed
An arrow stitched into the carpet of my hotel room, pointing me to a sacred land and urging me to make the pilgrimage, is evidently unaware how exhausted I am from the flight. I can only lie still, so I
Go for a walk in a slower part of a city while you listen to this. Look around. What do you see? Just think it. Don’t say it out loud. Ask someone near you what time they were born. Hand
I’m going through what the scholars might call a mid-life crisis. When I was younger, my parents led me to think of the term as some kind of a joke. “Honey, Ray¹ bought a new Mercedes. What’s he need that
Most obituaries tell us nothing more than a chronological map of someone’s life, and a list of people the dead person knew. Everyone happens to be beloved by all who knew him, when this is the biggest piece of turdshit
People¹ always ask me where I get my ideas. Oh man, they come from everywhere! Dreams, strangers, the back of a bus that left me in its dust because I was too enrapt by a ladybug on a pole to
My drag name, if I ever need one, will be nothing if not Mary Brown. It might sound a little plain and spiritless at first glance, until you find out what it means, and what she represents, to me and
Another room of strangers, engulfed in a tense silence, reminiscent of a family gathering before the bitterness begins. The barely-audible newscast on the television angled down from the back corner, near the ceiling, is the clang of cutlery in the
Being surrounded by grocery-shopping crowds all day has given me a chance to truly discover who the general public is and what they’re doing here. All of these people are real, most you have seen in your travels, and one
Secretary-General of the United Rice Tribunal: Okay, so we’re all agreed. Malawi gets full rice, Mali gets bubkis. Gavel is pounded [he pounds the gavel at this point but announces it for the record and the deaf], and we can
