So, to sum up: Thanksgiving, small family gathering, lovely, Luke home, talked to Taylor on the phone and heard Ellie coo, my mom settling into the noise and change of our busy house and smiling often, at the food, the love-insistent cats, the pie, oh the pie, happy, happy, whee! Because among those things I …
Frankman
Ex newspaper editor/writer fella. Cultural crank. Spiritual dilettante. Music snob/music junkie. Family dude. Pet crazy. Craft-beer jerk. Coast craver. Short sometimes of fuse. Short always of fuel. Very tall on paper.
Trying to put my hands on these photos all day yesterday; now, as a new today is upon us, I find them, not at all where I remembered them to be. I’m not sure there’s not something awfully appropriate in that. So above is my old man as a young man, career Army, visiting family …
The English language has failed me, again. Because, you see, I am sick. And tired. I do not want to be something so wretchedly mundane. Not sick, and tired. Seriously, either sick or tired would be more than enough. But. I am sick, yes, a nasty little summer-cold bug has for several days made me …
Hurt and disillusioned, I’m giving up and just going the hell on to bed. I have sat quietly here for the past hour or so, straining for any hint of the brash martial sounds heralding the first engagements in our Second Civil War out there within the great American night, as has been loudly predicted …
I have my particular issues with life, as we all do. A constant for me: Why does doing the right thing so often feel like doing exactly the opposite? I got home from this afternoon’s ill-advised sick-Frank walk in the wilting heat, and was stumbling and coughing and post-nasal-dripping my way through putting up the …
I do not do well with gray skies. What can I tell you, it’s just a thing. And sooner or later, I guess, I was destined to reach some breaking point. Because no matter how nicely it may rhyme, you cannot, in fact, wish the gray away. And so today. Gray skies today. I considered …
In the annals of furry FUs, this: Big Orange. Biggie. Bigs. Aka our beloved bastard Biggles, not allowed on our kitchen-island counter. Says me, anyway. Biggles himself refuses to acknowledge this, despite our long-standing ritual of him climbing up, sometimes in blatant view of disbelieving humans, to investigate whatever — untended wet cat food being …
Tributes have been piling up for Anthony Bourdain since news of his death last Friday morning in a luxury hotel in Strasbourg, France. As tributes will when death intersects celebrity, particularly when suicide is the culprit. Tributes in this case are requisite, however. This was Anthony Bourdain, for chrissakes. Anthony Fucking Bordain! Former chef and …
How to tell if it’s a Monday: Did you just clean fresh turtle pee from one of your car’s floor mats in the parking lot before work, pinning your tie up high onto your shirt to keep from re-living reptile urine all day long? If you answered yes, then it’s safe to say it’s a …
Even as a raging heathen, I do love me some Christmas. My favorite holiday, hands down (and that’s even taking into account the Hadaka Matsuri guys-in-sumo-loincloths-competing-for-trinkets festival every February in Japan). I dig Christmas not just for the purty lights, that phenomenal Pogues/Kirsty McColl song and the excuse to put liquor in sweetened egg froth and …