I. No one needs to ask the origin of my neighborhood’s name: Deer Park. Deer walk the streets of Deer Park, Ohio, like humans have yet to take over. They are the living ghosts of nature, sleeping in front yards, staring at you with a tense readiness when you walk past. The penance the deer…
I got into teaching because I was an educational rebel. I was a late bloomer, and while I was a curious person interested in many things, I didn’t put much stock into formal education. I blinded myself to keeping my eyes open for anything by keeping my eyes open to only a bubble’s worth of…
Environmental Control Usually, when you grow up with something, like a childhood of enjoying not-so-pleasant looking ripe bananas–speckled oxidation brown, far from a pristine green or yellow–it becomes normalcy, a state of comfort and not-surprise. It’s eating around the mold. It’s sleeping without worrying that your body will roll out of bed onto the floor….
The Fears That Bind Us Coming up any sort of stairs was my greatest childhood fear. Sure, I wouldn’t be happy about going down to a dark basement: I’d race for the lights and move slowly around corners. But, for some reason, I felt like going upstairs was like defying a monster’s plan, like you…
Made a YouTube video about rock climbing fall training:
Preamble In a 24 hour period over the course of the 26th and 27th of February, I was the victim of two forms of vehicular emoting. The first was the “daring” sort of vehicular emoting. Not quite the most one can do with anger whilst seat-belted in a moving vehicle, but an act that carried…
The Industrial Nopes One of the reasons I became a teacher–and I know this is not what I should be saying–was so that I wouldn’t have to work in a cubicle. It was at the beginning of my teenagedom that I had suspected that the cubicle environment would not be my bag. I don’t remember…
My wife spread her arms as if to point out something egregious, something obvious and no-duh-ish. Her arms seemed to be indicating our living room. I scanned it. Nothing was amiss. I squinted. This was my way of letting her continue. “Your books,” she said. “Don’t you think this is hoarding? How many have you…
Working and College Like any American, I have my consumerist bent on worldly things, and while my time and focus was on college, I wanted to work a life sustaining job while surrounded with things I had a kinship with: books and computers. And like an idealistic ninny, I chose to work at a bookstore,…
Driving Opinions People really like to declare a city of drivers terrible. You’ve heard it, “People drive like [insert parts of speech here] around here.” The metric always changes. And I guess I can see a sort of difference in New York City drivers versus Cincinnati drivers, but Nashville versus Cincinnati? St. Louis versus Houston?…