He kindly passed me by — You know how you sometimes swallow something that’s a little too big and you have to relax and wait for it to make its way along your throat? That just happened to me. I sent a little coffee in after it to help it slide down. …

A blog entry if I was keeping a blog — The days between Christmas and New Year’s Day constitute the Saturnalia of the modern world. I love them. That’s when we usually visit our friends P & M. They are well into their 80s now so instead of staying at their house we rent an Airbnb nearby. When we were…

And other mysteries of the universe — The world confuses me. As if it was not enough trying to understand the mysteries of Quantum Theory and why The Little Drummer Boy remains on Christmas music rotation lists even though it makes everyone vomit, I have another problem, one I noticed only recently — My pee talks to…

Misconceptions — Another time, another journey. Somewhere an old man who gave me a ride in his luxurious 70s-era Cadillac opined, “When I was a young man — back in The Depression — I found hitch-hiking to be a great way to get around.” Feeling sure he wanted to suck my dick…

Nobody hitch-hikes anymore — My brothers and I hitchhiked as children. We did so with the full knowledge of our parents, who did little to try to stop us. I realize this scarcely seems credible in this, the day of the helicopter parent, but I swear to it on my mother’s ashes. We hitchhiked…

Begats for the modern world — Birds evolved from dinosaurs. Mastodons evolved from, what exactly? Other mastodons? Elephants? Wait, wrong temporal sequence. See that? I said “temporal sequence” which sounds sciency so you’ll think I’m smart. Back to birds. Here is our evolutionary timeline: Dinosaurs → Birds → Twitter Mastodons? Mastodons → Elephants → Masturbodon Except…

Choose your performance carefully or miss the juiciest bits — As should be obvious by now, I sing in one of those big community choirs. Every other year it’s the one piece of classical — baroque actually — music almost everyone has heard at least part of, Messiah by George Frederick Handel. Our new director, a young guy with a…

Of death and descants — My church choir director not only knows every single piece of choir music ever written, she also knows every one of the 47,000 descants for each of the 615 hymns in the 1982 Episcopal hymnal. If she doesn’t think any of the 28,905,000 available descants sufficiently impressive she writes a…

Make music with people and soon you love them — “OK let’s shake five!” We stand in a circle. Onetwothreefourfive! onetwothreefourfive! onetwothreefourfive! onetwothreefourfive! Onetwothreefour! onetwothreefour! onetwothreefour! onetwothreefour! Onetwothree! onetwothree! onetwothree! onetwothree! Onetwo! onetwo! onetwo! onetwo! One!one!one!one!wo-o-o-o-o-o-o-one… As we chant, we shake our right hands in the air five times, then our lefts five times, then lift our right feet and…