I don't know the precise title of the poem, or the precise year in which it was written, but there's an old piece by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which opens with the following words: People getting divorced / driving around with their things in their car...


My first encounter with Mr. Ferlinghetti was highly unanticipated - in my lowly high school, located in a suburb of Charlotte, the library included a handful of examples of beat writing: a general anthology, and two of Ferlinghetti's...

(February 2010 draft)

So there's this great moment in the world of customer service: you're completing a transaction, and it's usually not an especially impressive one, when the guy in question - in a moment of grand, high theatre - snakes his arm around the credit card terminal, a fat shield of flesh manouvered to prevent your (that is to say, my) prying eyes from making the mental notation of his PIN number.

Dirty peon or not, I've been the victim of nefarious...

I'm staying in this place, innocuously called the Family House. It's a bit like the kind of establishment that was once called a sanitarium, as a catch-all phrase: people who were dying, people who were recovering, people who were weird and trying not to be, or just random people the rest of the world didn't quite know how to deal with. It's very very clean, not sterile, but a vast improvement over my apartment. The transient population (we are all called "guests," as we live in a...

I have cancer. I've had it for a while now, and am fighting the good fight to get rid of it. At the ripe age of 42, it's not exactly what I was expecting at this point in my life. It's a $200,000 disease, though I have various kinds of insurance and cobras and medicaid or -care (whatever the one for people who aren't 65), disability (who can't pay me anything until May), and varied other arcane and obtuse varieties of social services. It has RUINED my credit. I'll be undergoing some stem cell transfusions,...