“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and — thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler would referee. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than …
don’t know where to begin. not really going to try. it’s all a blur. something about the mental states of cats contributing to the meta consciousness of the united states, contending with a human version of this cat , a dream where I was somehow on a sheer granite mountain top in a bare ice-laden …
A few of the women in my life are self-described feminists and sometimes they and I find ourselves in good-natured debates on the topic of gender politics. Most recently, it was about the controversy over some urinals (featured above). Their argument was that the urinals were somehow demeaning to women and I disagreed (the fact …
EDITORS NOTE: What follows is a monologue written as part of a planned entry into the Golden Poo Awards 2012 Short Film Contest. Unfortunately time got away from me and there’s no feasible way to create a viable entry before the deadline. Therefore, I’m posting the script here with the hope that it might in …
An admissions essay I wrote a while back that turned into more of a manifesto. Just moved into a new apartment and my life right now is manic and intense. Feeling a bit manifesto-ish as I look back on the past year and realize how much has changed and how little is different. My name …
I’m a graduate student, a certified mainframe system programmer, and for fun I write fugues. Whatever else may be said about me, stupid isn’t a label that fits. I’m pretty damn smart. Despite this, I’m being consistently put in my place, not by one of my peers, but by an adorable seven-pound cat. Anyone remember …
Esmeralda: What is your name? Butch: Butch. Esmeralda: What does it mean? Butch: I’m American, honey. Our names don’t mean shit. Names have power. They have power in that they frame the conceptual boundaries of what a thing is and is not. The names we …
Dear Ira, Recently, my local NPR affiliate, KPBS, held their annual Spring pledge drive. For about a week, the station’s regular programming was preempted by pleas for money and promises of chincy trinkets as a reward for my pledge. Among the solicitors for my money were Alec Baldwin and you, who aired a phone conversation …
A while back I got a haircut from arguably the most racist barber in San Diego. Pausing between snips of my rapidly disappearing locks of hair he giggled (yes giggled) as he recounted a story of an illegal immigrant being shot, ranted vehemently about ‘the goddamn Jews’, then lamented the passing of sharecropping in …
The common meaning of the idiom ‘wag the dog’ is to divert attention away from something important to something unimportant such that the former is forgotten in favor of the latter. I always found this puzzling because to me, the idiom evokes an image of a dog totally unaware that he’s being manipulated by his …
