New story

I have a new story titled "Minor Keys" on Storyglossia. This piece is told from the first-person point-of-view of a 17 year-old girl named Jenny, who finds herself over-her-head in a troublesome situation with an older guy.

This is part of the circle of stories I've been writing, on and off, since grad school. If you're interested, the next story in this plot line is titled "Sasquatch," and it was published a couple of years ago by Freight Stories.

There's also a flash fiction piece in Jenny's voice titled "A Long Way from New Hampshire" on The Wilderness House Literary Review.

Enjoy.

New Douche Hair

Sometimes I astound myself with the enormity of my self-indulgence. Without dicing existential tomatoes, I'm well-aware that there's a world outside of myself, a world rife with violence and pain and injustice and heartache, but none of it has seemed all that interesting, important or significant since the haircut, a cataclysm on scale with the floods in Pakistan.

Okay, I saw you grimace. Hyperbole only goes so far until it becomes insensitivity. But, goddamn it, this is my hair and I'm vain!

A week and three days past, in the Year of Our Lord, 2010, I walked into Great Clips with my son, both of us looking to clean up our respective mops in anticipation of the first of school. My hair was on the longish-side---think Jackson Browne circa 1975---and I didn't want to look like a small-time pot-dealer with my new classes starting.

Allow me to digress. Despite my inexorable vanity, I have been going to hair-shearing factories with banal generic monikers like SuperCuts, Great Cuts, Great Clips, The Pube Hut, etc. for almost a decade and have received the same essential cut every time. I call it "The Men's Regular," a clip on the sides and back and some snips off the top.

Here's the thing: the whole idea of trying to explain what I truly want my hair to look like makes me anxious, nervous, and uncomfortable. When I envision my hair, I see myself with Tom Brady's face, so everything looks great in theory. I always have a plan going in, but when I sit down in the chair, and the woman (the reason men go places like SuperCuts is the outside chance that a hot chick will cut our hair and accidentally brush her boob against our head) asks me what I want, I freeze. My words become jumbled.

It was no different at Great Clips, a week and three days ago, when the woman cutting my hair, a young girl with a sexy Spanish-accent, asked me what I wanted to do with my hair.

"Um, just a regular haircut," I said, frazzled. "You know, clean it up."

My little Latin clipper seemed zealous, exuberant about severing my Jackson Browne and making me, a 35 year-old high school English teacher, look hip. But, apparently, she needed more directives. "Clean it up" wasn't going to cut it (funny, me pun).

Before I could protest, a great mound of grayish-black hair was sheared from the top of my head, and from there, it became a blood-letting. I knew for the next month of my life I'd be handling the ubiquitous "Did you get a haircut" question, trailed by the "What a douche" whispers as the questioner walked away.

And, as you can see, my haircut looks douchey. Molded with hair gel, the front is flirting with faux-hawk, but there's no other option. So I'm in douche purgatory as it grows out. But I've learned my lesson, and my days at The Pube Hut are over. My wife has suggested her hairstylist, and while it might seem gay or metro, it beats the hell out of this.

There is much tragedy in this world of ours. In the words of Joseph Conrad, it's the "horror." And I'm yet another causality, another stooge for this big stupid stage.

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On another note: my story "My Husband, Houdini" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editor of Bananafish. Thank you, Daniel. I'm humbled and honored.

Begone, knave

Johnny Damon reminds me of a knave from a Shakespeare play. He’s Edmund from King Lear; Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew; perhaps, he's the Sweet Prince himself in Hamlet. By calling him a "knave," I don’t mean that Johnny Damon is necessarily evil. He is, however, disingenuous, boastful while seemingly sincere, a trickster, a chameleon, and overall, full of shit.

I hope I can post this piece fast enough for it to be relevant. Right now, Johnny is “thinking hard”—a paradox, for sure, in The Land on Damon—about whether or not he will accept Boston’s offer to return for the final six weeks of the season. But seeing he’s absolutely loves New York…I mean, Detroit, like any good actor, he needs time to rehearse his role.

My thoughts on this issue were said best by Boston Globe columnist Eric Wilbur. Unfortunately, Mr. Wilbur had to refrain from using any of George Carlin’s seven dirty words. I don’t. So here goes.

If Johnny Damon does return to Boston, baseball fans everywhere will see---once and for all--- how two-faced and willfully ignorant that these Red Sox Nation Pink Hat, media-created, fair-weather, piss-soaked, retarded shithead motherfuckers truly are. Like a bunch of trained seals, they’ll stand and give Johnny his big phony "welcome back" ovation, and ever the performer, Johnny will raise his helmet and rub a crocodile tear from his eye. There will be all this cooing about “the reunion” and how it was never really Johnny that Sox fans hated, but those dreaded pinstripes. And The Pink Hats will forget (if they bothered to read about it) the barking Johnny did in the off-season in 2006 about how the Red Sox disrespected him—before running that saccharine full-page bullshit ad in the Boston Globe (above). And The Pink Hats will forget how Johnny was so, so happy to be a Yankee and how he so, so appreciated that rich Yankee-tradition—after he told Boston media he would “never” play for the Yankees.

Is anyone seeing a pattern?

Maybe this new marriage between the knave and the clueless Pink Hat fans who stand only to sing “Sweet Caroline” or when some small melodramatic morsel of nostalgia---remember Nomar's return?----compels them, maybe it will be harmonious. But I, for one, am not buying Johnny Damon’s bullshit. I hope he stays in Detroit where he really, really loves it, and let my injury-stricken Sox go down with their dignity intact.

Knave, begone.

Just because.

Just because I'll be seeing old friends this weekend.

Just because we're all a little better off with a little Jerry in our lives.

Just because my wife is home, and we need to relax.

Just because this makes me smile.

MULLET-OUS: Part II: "My Face Is About to Explode"

Things were slightly better in Mullet-ville after a dismal sophomore year of high school. There are, however, a couple of things that can be discerned from Mullet Portrait #2:

1. It's still the same essentially mullet; in fact, I'm not someone who changes my hairstyle all too often. I've had the same haircut, varying in length, for the past 12 years or so. There was a brief period, circa 2003-05, where I bought hair-clippers and buzzed my head, but, as you might expect, I looked like a guy who should ride the little bus. Unless a male---especially Caucasian males---is going bald and trying to work with baldness, he should not shave his head. Ultimately, it looks bad, grows back into Chia-hair, and seems largely unnecessary unless you're a.) in boot camp b.) serving our country in a Middle-Eastern desert, or c.) part of the Aryan Nation. The only thing worse is "cop hair," which is the close buzz with a little pubic patch on top. I digress.

2. The blue sweater, which I rocked for the next decade, is a step up from the sad shower curtain-patterned shirt, unbuttoned halfway to expose my pasty white hairless chest, in Mullet Portrait #1.

3. I'm almost smiling. This can only mean one thing: There was a female insane enough to let me touch her boobs.

However, despite advances toward becoming a semi-tolerable member of the human race, my acne became an indefatigable force on my face, shoulders, and back. For the next two years, I would see a dermatologist, a short man shaped like a weeble with a creepy Hitler 'stache, who tried everything known to modern medicine at the time to clear it up. Finally, I decided to take Acutane, which was like taking daily napalm pills that nuked my skin from the inside out. I had a six-month sunburn, but it did the trick and my skin cleared before I left for college.

Yes. Things were slightly better, but the mullet was also starting to lose popular favor as Grunge music, flannel shirts, and the spider-plant---sometimes referred to as "half-a-hippie"--- hairstyles [edit: for those of you who don't remember, you shaved the sides and back while the you grew the top long, long, long) became the rage. I would eventually grow the spider plant, but only after grudgingly giving up my mullet, two years later.

So take it in, folks. While certainly not the most ostentatious mullet (it's no Kentucky Waterfall), it's clear that I partied while getting my business done. And look at that shit-eating grin. I have a mullet and I'm modestly happy. It only goes to show you what I complete idiot I was. Am.

Someone call the little bus.

MULLET-OUS: Part I: "It Sucks To Be 15"

For many years, I've labored over this: Would I ever disclose pictures of my mullet in a public forum? Once worn with pride, my mullet has shamed me throughout my adult life. However, after doing an internet radio show last week with Karl Koweski, I figured it was time to exorcise these demons.

Let's start at the end and flashback because I like to do funky shit like that.

As a first-year college student in 1993, a year or so into the Grunge era, roughly two years after the mullet was even remotely fashionable in anyplace other than The South and certain pockets of Mid-America, I showed up on campus at a small college in New Hampshire, to quote another former mullet-man David Crosby, with "my freak flag flying." My mullet was lush and lively, an inexorable force on the back of my neck. I figured the babes would be lining up to run their hands through those luscious black locks, so when I moved into the dorm, I was truly confounded by the fact that I wasn't making any friends.

Shucking the obvious, I blamed it on my Rhode Island-accent.

Then two weeks into my college life, after realizing two guys on my floor were also from Rhode Island, I marched to the barber downtown and had my mullet severed. Never again, other than in these pictures I now share with you, would my mullet show its now ignominious locks.

But at one time, it killed.

When I started growing it (see picture above), I was 15-years-old, filled with the universal teenage angst, and ready to start PAHH-TEYY-INNN'. Bring on the babes. Bring on the booze. Bring on the drugs.

But there was one small problem: I was a complete fucking loser.

While I played on the football team, I was basically a tackling dummy for the varsity squad. Each week on the practice team, I was a slower and dumber version of our opponent's halfback, and the varsity defense would hammer me until I was so concussed I couldn't stand steady. These days, parents would freak out given, you know, science and evidence and shit. But at the time, we called it "taking your lumps."

Meanwhile, in an attempt to seem somewhat cool, my mullet grew and grew and became something I could use as a personal tag. Like so many kids on the skids, I found solace in hard rock and heavy metal. I was listening to G'N R's Appetite, Metallica, the obligatory Zeppelin and Van Halen (Sammy was a pussy) and Sabbath, Iron Maiden and The Cult, so what the hell gives? Why weren't the metal chicks digging me?

Again, I refer you to the picture above.

Things didn't get much better that year. My grades tanked, and shortly before turning 16, I discovered pot. Actually, it was about to get slightly better.

Internet radio tonight

For anyone interested, I'm going to be doing an internet radio show with my friend Karl Koweski tonight. This is sure to be as bawdy, irreverent, and crude as you might expect a conversation between Karl and me to be.

If you'd like to join in the fun, call into the show and chat, the number is at the top of this link.

Check it out here.

For those of you looking for a wholesome Garrison Keiller-type poetry hour show, stay away. Stay far, far away. This WILL likely offend you.