Is there anything more featureless than being a white, middle-class, heterosexual American male? There’s nothing controversial for us to fight for. Our job is to do our part to keep the species moving forward, and, thanks to religion and politics, we tend to screw that up. Our value has been reduced to our purchasing power. And when we don’t have much of that, we just fade away. Or we write books about raging against the machine that few read, and…
All young people should get a blog. I don’t care whether it’s a custom-hosted blog like this one, Medium, or Tumblr, teenagers should be documenting their ideas and experiences online in long form. A friend shared an unfortunate story with me this week about his son who was kicked off of a sports team at school. The reason for the dismissal was that he’d said something on Snapchat that someone misconstrued as bullying, and the school has a one-strike policy…
Few things on earth are as fertile as a child’s imagination, or as fragile as a little girl’s heart. She was 7. Whenever we’d poll the family as to what we should watch on movie night, she’d say Titanic. Every. Time. She loved the music, the costumes, and the love story. Titanic was pure enchantment to Cozette. So when I was shopping for Christmas gifts that year, I Googled “Heart of the Ocean.” Sure enough, the query returned links to…
When you get right down to it, we’re all just rats. “Look at me and how fast I can go! Join me and run fast too!” Said the rat with the big microphone spinning on the wheel. Smiling his rat smile. And we do. Because rats are simple-minded and easily manipulated. You can do tests on rats. Experiments. You can even give them cancer to see if they’ll survive. Keep them intoxicated and with full bellies and you can do…
“Today’s the fourth of July. Another June has gone by. And when they light up our town I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky.” – Aimee Mann, 4th of July Part of the American problem is that, for some of us, in our heads we believe we’re all the same. We get up and look out our windows and see neighbors who look like us. We shop at grocery stores where most of the people drive the same…
We went to see Jurassic World on Saturday, and something amazing happened. I became the old guy whom young guys detest. As there were four of us going, and it was lunchtime and we hadn’t eaten, we got a big bucket of popcorn and split a big Sprite (don’t judge, that’s the only time we drink soda) before we found our seats. Because we got there early, and there were two hours of previews, we needed a refill of both…
