Not-yet-published pieces, stories, essays, rants, and random strangenesses

I’m not sure who said it. Probably my acupuncture physician, but my memory is a bit vague; for all I know, my friends have been saying...

Someone once asked if I took hallucinogens before bedtime. I said no, but I’m beginning to think there’s something in the water. Last...

Will someone please tell me why in the world this song from the Broadway musical Hair should play over and over and over and over and...

Jim Morrison wrote “Strange Days,” the song, for The Doors’ album of the same name, in 1967. The album was considered an artistic...

I am not a particularly heavy sleeper. You could say I sleep like a dog, or a wolf; that is, with one ear nearly always awake, ready to...

I mentioned on Facebook that poetry saved my life. Adam and I were discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins (Adam had written a few lines of...

Now that I’ve finished reading Sedaris’s thoroughly enjoyable When You Are Engulfed in Flames Writing is an athletic activity. It comes...

In the seventh grade, we were taught Modern Math. My teacher, a man with a thick Southern accent whose face looked like one of those...

by Jeffrey Weiss, DallasNews.com The psilocybin mushroom was a tripper’s choice back in the 1960s. Actually, it was the herbal head-trip...

A frequent motif in my dreams is where I step into a life I am (or someone else is) currently living elsewhere, to taste what that life...

Many people will say it is morally acceptable to pull a switch that diverts a train, killing just one person instead of the five on the...

These parents believe horses and shamans can unlock their son’s autistic mind. This is their journey of discovery by Tim Rayment The...

By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times | July 31, 2007 In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a...

Einstein told us that matter and energy are the same Stuff moving at different speeds. The molecules in ice move very slowly indeed. They...

This morning, groggy and bleary-eyed, I stumbled out of bed and headed for the computer, as I do every morning (I am such a creature of...

Do You Believe in Magic? By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times January 23, 2007 A graduate school application can go sour in as many ways...

Today was a difficult day, but I’m not entirely sure why. My car was repaired in record time, and cost half as much as the original...