I wake up early and nudge Rudy from doggy sleep inside his beloved crate where he snoozes like Bill the vampire on True Blood. Rudy stretches and runs immediately downstairs grabbing one of his dozens of tennis balls, some broken. I did not know it was possible to break a tennis ball until we got [...]
Jeff Johnson sent me a website I have not seen before. He is like a Google bot when it comes to rooting around the Web. It was featured on Holy Kow, Guy Kawasaki’s content aggregation site. The site purports to analyze your writing style and tell you what author you write like. It is exploding [...]
Clear, blue skies pushed choking humidity to the last 20 feet above the crabgrass. That way, even tall people on a ladder or a drunk sitting in a lawn chair on top of his RV could feel it. Temps flirted with 100º. Baseball and water sports, hotdogs and alcohol happened simultaneously in every part of [...]
On a recent trip to a large, well-known zoo, my family and I strolled into the funky-smelling monkey house. Apes and gorilla’s of every brand lounged and hung, one-armed, from limbs behind the fences, moats and glass. When we got to the chimps, things went terribly south, literally.
I’ve often spoken of my bizarre Forest Gumpian past as it relates to famous people (especially Southerners), and I will not rehash that list of historical and cultural figures yet again. It is just not that interesting anymore, at least to me, anyway. But I have had one unmentioned encounter that warrants a story. To [...]
Perhaps you’ve read about the Southeast Asian Civets’ droppings coffee. Very rare poo, indeed – literally. A cat-like Civet eats the coffee beans, digests them, craps them out and people gather the caffeinated civet turd mixture and sell it for $227 a pound. And people drink it.
Over the weekend, I heard about a brilliant piece of thinking from a man in Florida. His name is Ricardo. I hate to use peoples’ names in this space since sometimes my writing attracts unsavory elements and angry retorts, but suffice it to say, Ricardo’s idea was not mine and it is genius.
Our backyard lies in the shade in winter. Snow is still two feet deep back there. The slow melt of day freezes into a hockey rink every night. Icicles the size of Darth Vader’s light saber flow off the eaves of the house like crystal daggers. Some are 5 feet long. Fifteen feet of steps [...]
We all have to be something. Aries, Tarus, Winnebago. I am a Sagittarius. I have never put even a remote amount of faith into such things. I’ve always figured our fortune was guided or blunted by our own actions, not the stars. In the last year, however, I have started regularly reading my horoscope in [...]
On a recent trip to the Deep South to take care of some unpleasant business, I began to notice a few incidences of the famous Southern accent evolving into something akin to a foreign language. Not everyone speaks it, but here and there, a few people have swallowed a mouthful of slurry verbiage.
I hate to admit this, but I have eaten an animal we hit during a rainstorm as we were driving down the road. Truth is, I have eaten more than one. It’s been a long time, and it was in Alabama, but I still remember the deer staring us down before leaping to its [...]
Christmas morning 1972. Smells of link sausage hang above a table filling with grits, eggs, cathead biscuits and homemade jelly from the blueberry bush out back. The aroma of Prell shampoo sneaks out from under the bathroom door and blends with the scents that were uncorked during Christmas Eve’s gift opening. For some reason [...]
I get a lot of catalogs this time of year. They are filled with fruitcakes, hams, smoked turkeys, cheese, jelly, cookies shaped like Santa, etc. So what do they do with this stuff come January? Hopefully they don’t save it until next year and put it in the next catalog. But since the half-life [...]
When I was growing up, we weren’t exactly wealthy, to say the least. For entertainment during the holidays, my family (and sometimes friends) would brew up a Thermos of strong coffee, pile into the old Bel Air, fog up the windows, and ride around Montgomery, Alabama looking at Christmas lights and decorations in the nicer [...]
I heard part of this story and witnessed the other part of it. The year was 1974. Down on Highway 29 headed south out of Andalusia, Alabama towards Florala and the Florida line, a single, tall evergreen tree leaned achingly toward the road. It had been bent over a little to the east by the [...]