Recently, I said to my wife, “If I die before you, please don’t have my funeral in a megachurch. I might have to come back and haunt you for that.” Inspired by a funeral pageant on television, I’d made the mistake of imagining my own taking place with smoke machines, jumbotrons, and an army of bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace.” If you’ve never been in a megachurch, they’re likely to have all
On October 27, my birthday, the second season of the Netflix science fiction/horror/thriller series Stranger Things premiered. Normally, my wife and I would’ve binged all nine episodes in two nights, the way we did the first season last year, but this time I had another mission. I was helping my father move from Alabama to Colorado. As a friend pointed out, since I was driving through the swamps of Louisiana
Let’s say something bad happens to a guy. Maybe we don’t know if he had it coming. It could be a car accident, a life-altering injury, or a terrible disease. Perhaps he loses everything he owns in a natural disaster, or worse, gets caught with his hands in a metaphorical cookie jar. One day, everything’s fine, the next, curtains. This isn’t a difficult scenario to imagine. It only takes a glance around
Maybe you’ve heard the old saying about teachers not being competent enough to actually do the thing they’re teaching. After all, the logic goes, if someone is proficient at their craft, why would they forgo fame, acclaim, and the ability to purchase frighteningly expensive houses just to slum it as a teacher? The horror. I don’t buy it. It makes no sense to assume that being a teacher disqualifies someone
We lost another one a few days ago. By “we,” I mean people who like good music, and by “another one,” I mean, of course, Tom Petty. All this week, every time I’ve had the chance, I’ve been listening to his music, whether on Pandora or my own digital collection. I’ve been reading tributes from his friends and fellow musicians, and I’ve been commiserating with my friends over our loss.
Friday before last, I went to see David Sedaris read at the Center for the Performing Arts in Denver. For those who don’t know, Sedaris is an American author, humorist, and radio contributor best known for his delightfully skewed slice-of-life essays and articles about his family and life abroad. Going in, I hadn’t been sure whether Sedaris would be doing a signing that evening or not, so I was happy
