Archive for the ‘Piece of Mind’ Category
Sherry’s best days were behind her when we met. She was pudgy – a ripple above her waist in her dry-cleaning shirt. An attitude that’d been sharpened in arguments and by disappointment. She showed up at work with her hair wet on her back, for the mid-afternoon shift, and she cussed and smoked the way you’d expect from a junior in high school. Those were the impressions of a junior class college boy who thought he could spend his summer reading his way into an editorship with the campus newspaper. I was right about the reading. I was wrong about her. (more…)
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Tags: College
Hey, here’s a post I made today to Career College Central. This is the industry magazine I edit that focuses on the career college sector of higher education. There is some information here on my journalism background and the fate of print journalism. I originally wrote it for this blog, but it was a bit too rambling even for these pages. I cleaned it up and it actually made some sense.
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Tags: Journalism
Big, blue sky. Yellow sunshine. Jumping on my shadow. Raising my arms. Watching the long bends fall to my side. Throwing an inflatable ball into the back basketball goal with every hope that it will go in. Sweet smells from new flower beds and budding plants floating to my nose, just arriving on the gentle breeze. I had a toy batmobile with two slots for Batman and Robin. I pushed that around the sand and what spilled on the pavement. (more…)
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Tags: Spring
Irish Lies
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Nothing says Irish pub more than country music and teller windows.
It was late on Sunday afternoon and the shops in the Zona Rosa shopping district were closed when I came to a stop light. I’d never been in O’Dowd’s, but I was driving by looking for help wanted signs and the music was blaring out into the streets. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it from what I’d heard, it seemed like there must be a party going on inside. No signs were in the windows. There weren’t any windows. Still, I decided it was worth a try, and turned onto a side-street to the nearest parking lot.
The spring winds had picked up and it flopped my hair to the opposite side and blew my collar up. I felt like James Dean in the iconic photo taken in New York, his hands shoved in his pockets and half-shrugging in the rain. I followed the music sound to the doors.
A guy was smoking outside. He wore khakis and a short-sleeved button up and looked like he should be a bible study, light a candle for everyone to sing around and tending to his sexless marriage. I took him for a dad, an unhappy one who’d settled for self-gratification a couple years into the marriage and had been praying for some ball slapping or something a little more unusual by their 10th anniversary. (more…)
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Tags: O'Dowds
Hard-up writers cheat with them, indescreetly. Dressed in rain coats, they walk straight through the store to the Language section and the writing instruction books, a seedy bookshelf corner where ideas are being peddled for cheap. The writers stand there so they can be propositioned by the titles: The Write-Brain Workbook: 366 Exercises to Liberate Your Writing, The Writer’s Idea Book, Unjournaling: Daily Writing Exercises that Are NOT Personal, NOT Introspective, NOT Boring!. Liberated writing? Not sure what that is, but it sounds good. Not boring? Yeah, I don’t want my work to be boring. Ideas? I don’t have any. I’ll take them all! What these publishers are selling is addictive – in high demand — and writers are willing to pay top dollar for mind-blowing inspiration. (more…)
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Tags: Writing Instruction
