I understand the religious idea behind Jehovah’s Witnesses coming to your door, trying to convert you to believe in whatever it is they believe it. Jehovah is Jesus I think, but a different Jesus than Catholic Jesus for whatever reason,
Only the most elite of symphonies, with the most particular and snooty of players, can afford to hire page turners for its stars. Someone whose sole duty is to wait until two sheets worth of music are played, and then
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
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
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
Emily, Graham, Oscar and Tony walk into a bar. Every Friday evening, the party of four enters through the side door of The Academic sometime around seven, commanding the attention of any guest who happens to already be inside. Their
The beach sends me away with enmity, so I head inland. But the jungle, it’s not mine. I defensively contend I’m a visitor when I feel like an intruder. The disruption of my invasion is not overlooked by those I
