Blog

  • Earworm Wednesday: This One is for My Wife

    I am not a fan of Garbage, but I have always given them props for the best 90’s grunge band name.

    The hook of this song has always dug into my head as soon as I start to hear it.

    This one is for you, dear wonderful wife.

  • (Title) (Unedited)

    Sometimes I sit down with my laptop, and I have no idea what it is that I am going to write, and then nothing happens. There is no inspiration, no spark, nothing happens, and I just sit here in my livingroom, looking out the window.

    Then there are those super rare moments when I sit down and I know exactly what it is that I am going to do, and how I want to say it. Yeah, like I said, those are rare.

    What most often happens is that I have to sit down and force myself to do something creative. The thing I want most in life, I have the hardest time making myself do. I would rather do anything else in life, than what I am doing right now, which is trying to figure out what to write. And even sometimes when I know what I want to write, I can’t commit to just sitting down and doing it.

    But then again, when I choose not to write, or do anything creative for that matter, I feel like shit. Everything in me starts screaming at me that I am wasting time, I am losing another day, that the reason that I never amounted to anything is because I am so completely lazy.

    So I sit in front of my computer, and nothing comes. Then I start looking out my window again.

  • Not Today, Media! (Unedited)

    I didn’t mean to, but I sort of didn’t look at the news today. I will say “sort of” because I did watch the local morning news to see what the weather would be like for the kid as she got dressed for school, and I did read one op-ed as I was doing laundry…

    But outside of that…

    And it felt pretty good. It felt good not know what was going on today in the world. I mean, I know the Knicks won yesterday.

    I wanted to stay off social media as well, but that is a harder egg to crack. I know I should do a detox, as a couple of friends of mine have done that from time to time. They all say it did them good, but then they all return to social media.

    What I will fully admit is that since Pandemic, I have horrible habits when it comes to my phone, and even watching tv. I am ashamed to admit how much YouTube I have started watching at night before bed. It’s not that these habits eat up all of my time; its that these habits have diminished my attention span, and have also become my go to action when I feel bored or if I have time to kill.

    You know what this feels like? When I used to smoke. Smoking used to fill up the dead time in my day. If I had an extra ten minutes; why not smoke? If I’m board; smoke. So, IO know I am not being dramatic when I say the social media is an addiction. I have an addiction.

  • ODDS and ENDS: World Cup Time, Coffee Shops, and Mother’s Day

    ODDS and ENDS: World Cup Time, Coffee Shops, and Mother’s Day

    (This rock had got to roll…)

    Man typing on laptop in a busy NYC coffee shop with pedestrians outside
    It’s uncanny how much this AI image looks just like me.

    Just about a month until my favorite world sporting event which is run by one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. I speak of FIFA, and I am not the first person to say this, but the funniest at it would be John Oliver back in 2014. I won’t beat that dead horse again, but I will say that outside of the ridiculous train tickets to get to MetLife Stadium, or the lack of hotel reservations, or how everyone thinks the tickets are too expensive, everything seems great for the tournament! I hate the fact that everything going into the World Cup is nothing but greed and bullshit, and at the same time, the whole thing starts in a month, and I am stuipdly excited about it! I download the FIFA app, and yesterday I started looking at the schedule to figure out which matches I will be watching. I have a good feeling for a month, I won’t get shit done. No writing, reviews, or parenting in fact. Nothing will be happening other than me parked in front of my tv watching football.

    I wrote in a coffee shop yesterday and it was pretty cool. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and I was a tad self conscious about it for a minute. But I needed to make a change in my writing habits as I had run into a wall and wasn’t getting the productivity at home like I used to. The main reason was that there are too many distractions at home, which is also one of the big reasons I never liked working from home. I will watch tv and nap before I will get any work done. But if I go to an office, or some place that I am paying to be at, then I have skin in the game and that makes me focus. Which is what I received yesterday in the local coffee place, that was out of my neighborhood, but still was a cool place to be.

    Call your mama.

  • Flash Fiction Review: “Rewind” by Cole Beauchamp

    (The flash fiction story “Rewind” by Cole Beauchamp appeared at Lost Balloon on January 7th, 2026.)

    The flash fiction that I love straddles a precarious knife’s edge. On one side is the prose, the other being the poetic, and if they counter balance correctly, a beautiful harmony is created. Reading Cole Beauchamp’s “Rewind” put me right on that the edge’s sweet spot; a tactile narrative countered with an eternal instant.

    The structure of “Rewind” is divided into three section, each beginning with the same first line, “I have something to tell you…” In the first section, a couple is descending down a mountain during a hike while the husband attempts to explain what is implied to be his infidelity, which the wife has no interest in hearing. The section ends with the wife accidently falling off the path, tumbling down, and all goes black, followed by one word: Rewind. The second section takes places in the past, this time the wife is making a special dinner attempting to make up to her husband for all the time that she’s been away. Just as in the first section, the second section concludes with the wife losing her footing and falling, again with all going black; Rewind. The final section takes places the night before their wedding, and them sneaking out to see each other, with the wife stating that they “can’t rewind any further.”

                The three moments selected in “Rewind” are snap shots of this marriage. The first being the only one that I believe takes place in a tactile moment. This marriage is over, even if the husband isn’t aware of it, for the wife knows that she has stopped loving him. When she falls and all goes black, that ushers in the next two section which I will argue take place in her memory, existing in her own eternal instant. The second section is close to a mirror image of the first section; same opening line, the disappoints, to apologies, and the falling. The first was his fault, and now we are being shown how she was an accomplice in the death of this relationship. But the second section acts as a bridge; though it is in the eternal, the language Beauchamp uses is still rooted in factual descriptions. When the third section arrives, the language softens, the poetic is embraced, and thematically, a melancholic tone is embraced which intertwines with the recollection of the past optimism this marriage had.

                No one goes into a marriage thinking that it will fail, and when things go wrong, that initial optimism can feel like it’s a million miles away in a different life. Cole Beauchamp’s “Rewind” played with this theme in a structure that I appreciated for its inventiveness, but most importantly, this was the type of flash fiction that embraced the unique qualities this form can have, which are prose and poetry wrapped tightly together.