Mixed Tape, Side 2: What Mom and Dad Won’t Tell You, Prince, the Pogues, and Sinéad O’Connor Will
There were three things that most occupied my thoughts after I put down my LEGOs and became a teenager: music, books, and girls (yes, in that order). In my mind, and at an early age, I wove these together into a complex and often naïve narrative through which I came to understand myself, until eventually…
A little out of place, a little out of tune: on the passing of todd snider
Any kind of heaven every body doesn’t get in/Won’t seem like a heaven to me.—Todd Snider in “If Tomorrow Never Comes” The leaves are mostly off the trees now and the winter is approaching quickly as autumn shrinks to fewer and fewer days each year. The opportunities to shuffle lazily along a leaf-covered path in…
Hillbilly Liminality, part 4: The Division Production Industry
read Hillbilly Liminality, Part 1, Hillbilly Liminality, Part 2, and Hillbilly Liminality, Part 3 I live in an inner-ring suburb of a moderately-sized Midwestern city that was once much larger and once one of the richest cities on the planet. Back before falu red rust and milky white flight and cheap foreign steel. Back when…
A Battle of Bones: What is Hillbilly Liminality?
Some words on what I mean when I talk about hillbilly liminality. My writing on this site has spoken of hillbilly liminality in three posts now, yet I haven’t defined it. Aside from its pleasant and euphonious abundance of Ls, Is, and Ys—there is only one hard T, and so the the words roll along…
Hillbilly Liminality, Part 3
read Hillbilly Liminality, Part 1 and Hillbilly Liminality, Part 2 I awoke to a cacophony, and in my partial consciousness I could not identify the source. Hollow metal objects bouncing against concrete? What was happening? Where was I? Light flooded the room just as the sound grew louder, but no sense of awareness or understanding…
In Defense of Writing
In “The Etymologies,” Archbishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636 C.E.) said of rhetoric that it is “the science of speaking well; it is a flow of eloquence on civil questions whose purpose is to persuade men [sic] to do what is just and good . . . The orator is the good man [sic] skilled…
Hillbilly Liminality, Part 2
read Hillbilly Liminality, Part 1 Would that you had had the privilege of growing old amid the limited circumstances of your origin, and that Fortune had not raised you to such heights! Seneca, in Letters from a Stoic Many years ago—so many now that I can’t remember what year it actually was—I began spending a…
Hillbilly Liminality, part 1
Ohio has produced many great writers, but for the most part, with the exception of, say, Sherwood Anderson, they don’t write about Ohio in particular. As a writer myself, and that noun fits me uncomfortably, I rarely envy other writers—not their talent nor the quantity some seem to easily produce. There is one exception, and…
The Future is Not Plastics
“There is no such thing as ‘away’. When we throw anything away, it must go somewhere.” – Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA. I live just a few miles from the shores of Lake Erie in a quiet Cleveland suburb on a street lined with 100-year-old houses—a city deservedly designated a “Tree City USA”…
Mixed Tape, Side 1: The Ramblin’ Begins
A few years ago, two teenaged brothers were made instantaneously, if briefly, famous when they posted a video of themselves reacting to their first time hearing Phil Collin’s “In the Air Tonight,” the ubiquitous 1980s hit that provided a spooky, drum-filled part of many of my late-night FM radio listening sessions. The kids’ reactions were…
An Open Letter on the Occasion of My Father Dying
Sometimes when I am sitting alone at my favorite spot for drinks, I see a young person—I don’t know how young; I can no longer discern such things—walking by with, perhaps, a friend, and garbed in the attire and dyed hair of their great and glorious and searching youth. Sometimes they tread in Doc Martins…
Something More Than Our Fathers
I returnOnly in memory now, aloof, unhurried,To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,Had I not run away before my time. James Wright, from “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave” Your father’s was the first Black face I ever remember seeing. When I was a boy of four thumbing through the pages of my father’s high…
The Hollow Men and Women
I grew up in a community that was dealing with the same problems that other communities across the country were dealing with. But because it serves their needs to have us believe we are special—our communities, our lives, our desires, our fears—those in power tricked us all into believing we were different than every other…
On Critical Race Theory
It strikes me that as we continue plodding through the so-called culture wars, confronting as always systemic racism, anti-LGBTQ sentiments, and all the sprawling noise of white supremacist thinking, now stoked by the ginned-up outrage over critical race theory, the biggest lie about efforts toward equality in America is that those who engage those efforts…