To give a man pause, with just a look. I have also wanted to beat a man down properly, but I would rather just look capable of doing so; it’s easier on the knuckles.

To play the guitar, just like Jimmy Page. I also wanted to look… Read full post »

I went to kindergarten during the middle of the 1970’s, a decade of general degradation for all concerned. The following anecdotes, the entirety of my recollections of that year, can be said to represent part of my contribution to the general malaise and squalor that charac… Read full post »

“You are a neat person. You keep your room orderly and so forth” –My father, trying to explain my wonderful qualities that would eventually get me a girlfriend. “Gee Dad, I’d prefer that you confine yourself to making modest claims.”

&ldq… Read full post »

Thank you for having me speak tonight. This is an audience that I am anxious to reach.

What I want to talk about is being ‘cool on the street.’ I once had a client who was in some kind of religious residential program while his case was… Read full post »

When I contemplate my mother’s childhood and everything I know about it, I don’t initially have much to consider. I cannot name a single episode or event in my mother’s youth that defined her life and, in turn, my life by dint of her being my mother. Mind you, we lived… Read full post »

I was sitting across from my brother Andrew and my mother in a lousy mall restaurant in Brockton. I had made the mistake of ordering the steak which I was sawing through with some effort. My mother was prattling on about how she wasn't appreciated at her job. I… Read full post »

In 1981, my mother and step-father and brother and I moved to a place called North Attleboro. It was after my mother finally married Roger that the four of us moved there and started our half-hearted efforts to impersonate a family.

When I was young, the Attleboros were the home… Read full post »

Beer

We fell out of touch after my mom and his dad finally broke up. When he got his license and finally decided to come find me again, he brought me a bottle of peppermint schnapps. It was a nice gesture and getting drunk off that schnapps allowed us… Read full post »

I sat out in front of the brand new courthouse and smoked a cigarette. I had a big day planned, litigating a motion to suppress that I really believed in. It was the kind of case that could only be won on a motion. If the evidence came in,… Read full post »

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that before the Leviathan of government arose, anarchy prevailed and life was “nasty, brutish and short.” Well, when I was a kid, we ate pizza every Friday night and that meal was invariably “nasty, brutish and short.” It certainly wasn’t… Read full post »

We were at the infamous Burger King parking lot and my friend Dana was down on the ground, kicked in the balls, gasping and almost ready to puke. But that wasn’t his biggest problem. The real problem was that Dana hadn’t gotten into a fight with some jock on the football… Read full post »

I’ve told you that I appreciate you and I am grateful for the fact that you have always been so kind.  Whenever I was inattentive to my schoolwork with terrible results you never got angry about it. Maybe you remembered back to your own failures and felt humility on account/… Read full post »

Getting There 

In order to make a proper drink you need a proper vessel, especially if you are going to share. So take a gallon of milk out of the fridge and over to the kitchen sink. Your mother bought if for breakfast cereal, but you don’t eat… Read full post »

Taunton

Our mom had already left the restaurant. It wasn’t such a special place, some barbeque chain out in the sticks. Still, the meal was OK, hardy and satisfying to my still unsophisticated palate. I sat there with my brother and Bill, our mother’s new boyfriend and three o… Read full post »

1978

One the one hand it was a common enough problem. It is the subject of all kinds of letters to Dear Abby, and like advice columns. Usually the advice is the same. Consult a urologist to be sure, but it is probably an emotional issue that is causing it.… Read full post »

Lifers

“You have to understand, Walpole was a real shock to me. I was only eighteen when I got there.”

“What shocked you?”

“People there were mad fucked up, not like in Concord.”

“Yeah, but you are a tough guy.”

&ldqu… Read full post »

She was not the cutest girl in the class. And she was too tall for me. Even then, I had internalized the message that I shouldn’t date a girl taller than me. We had never talked much, I was shy and she was too, or so it seemed. Still, I knew… Read full post »

T’s Pub, 1990

In the fall of 1990 I was finally twenty-one and old enough to get served. I was getting pretty drunk, as always, and standing in the crowded bar with my drinking buddies Chris and Kendall. Chris started in on a joking story about how he rented a porno… Read full post »

Warning: this post is one of those dialogues I do that might contain some language that some prissy-prig types might find objectionable. You know who you are. What, it’s too late for a warning already? Anyways. . .

Cocksuck it and motherfuck it!

I have say, I object to t… Read full post »

When I was quite young, seven or eight, I had a visceral fear of trains. Not riding on them, but being near the tracks when trains drove by. Just looking at a train rolling down the tracks filled me with a kind of dread verging on nausea. Trains almost made me… Read full post »

Sometimes I wonder if I would have been a happier child if I was born twenty years later than I was. If that had happened, I would be only twenty now. Wouldn’t that be grand? Of course, that is not really the point. The question is whether I would have had… Read full post »

These days, if I saw a ten dollar bill on the sidewalk, I might not stoop down to pick it up. Probably I would, if it was a still day and I was in no particular hurry. However, if it was quite windy, and the sawbuck was briskly blowing down the… Read full post »

“I remember a quote from Leo Strauss that I read some years ago in Germany. It was in German and I barely remember it so this is a paraphrase of an amateur translation at best. It went something like, ‘no meaningful discussion of opinion polls can take place without acknowledging that… Read full post »

“So, I brought you here to give you some additional access to my mad fucking genius.”

“I thought we were having a coffee.”

“That too. So anyways, I have a few new ideas about healthcare to share with you, but before I get to that I want to talk about my… Read full post »