Before social media, each year on my birthday I’d get one card mailed to me from my mother and a call from her brother. Of course my wife and I would have a dinner or whatever, but the day went largely unnoticed. And that was totally cool. Then came Facebook where they asked questions like birthdate, hometown and whether I like ‘sleep’ or not. Innocuous personal questions that helped me ‘connect to’ other people. As I began playing around with…
Twenty years ago, I strolled into your life. You didn’t see me coming. I was just this young, white guy with enough charm to get you to trust me. And you did. So I placed a matchbook in the corner and waited for the right moment to strike. The right moment for me was always when I had you exactly where I wanted you based on my own needs, appetites and grand life schemes. Sometimes it was shortly after meeting…
Maybe I’m just oversimplifying, but it seems like what’s going on in DC these days is terribly calculated. House Speaker, Mr. “Get your ass in line,” John Boehner can’t lose. If he forces the President to accept his plan, he wins. If the President vetoes him, he wins. Which is to say that the only way the President wins is if the President gets his way, and the economy blasts off over the next year. Otherwise, and this is a lot…
Singer Amy Winehouse died on Saturday at the age of twenty-seven. I didn’t listen to her music, so I can’t pretend to be sad that she’s gone in terms of her art. But while she was alive, it seemed that she was in the news more for her drug and alcohol problems than her music. Ironically, she had a hit song called Rehab. As I write this post, we don’t yet know how she died. But judging from what we…
The day before we left on vacation three weeks ago, I tried getting my truck inspected. The NC DMV said it was due in July, so I made the short trip from my house over to the place I’ve had it inspected it for years. When I pulled into the station, which is little more than a one-room shack with two vehicle bays attached, I was greeted by a short white man in his late 20s who had the face…
When I first joined Twitter in the fall of 2008, my handle was @smashadv and my profile picture had me holding an orange in front of my face. It was a throw away shot from a photoshoot for a campaign I was working on. The image worked for me in the social spaces since I was only testing the waters and didn’t want to reveal too much about myself. I was playing it safe and all. Sometime in the summer…
