I thought I was a minimalist, totally opposed to the gluttony of empty consumerism. I’d strut through America’s cavalcade of commerci...

      Among the phone-drone German citizens huddled on the train platform, there is the Hello Guy. He never boards the S-Bahn with the rest;...

     There’s an old joke about the citizens of Deutschland that goes like this:           How many Germans does it take to screw in a lightb...

       There is, as we know, an idealized vision of European life held in the imagination of the average American Chomsky reader. Suave, Fre...

     C ertain ideas just seem to come out of nowhere when I first wake up in the morning. I rise from the depths of slumber, rubbing ...

     We weren’t going to Disney World, that’s for sure. We weren’t going to Hersheypark, Mt. Rushmore, Graceland, or that weird Flintst...

     Valentine’s Day, 1995. The wife and I were dining in an upscale restaurant in downtown Savannah. It was the sort of place that in...

     My brother was a man of vision, a man with a plan. Before his untimely demise, David Holt had announced new get-rich-quick scheme...

     I knew a girl in high school who worked a variety of mall jobs. First she worked in a chain store called The Petite Sophistica...

     As of this writing, I have reached the age of fifty. Old age is rapidly approaching, like the speeding of a comet destined to wi...

You, the addled, tweet-stuffed denizens of social media, grimace at the conglomerations of excess wordage we once called "books...

        During high school, in the depths of the 1980’s, my friend Gnat got a job working at the Guitar Exchange. It was a local ret...

     Gnat showed up in a van he said he’d been driving for two weeks, but it looked like he’d owned it for twenty years. It was covered ...

My math teacher, Mr. Pseudonym, gave us some fatherly advice back in 1984. He accessed the collective intelligence of the assembled hope...

      Y ou missed the Eurovision Song Contest. I know you missed it because, if you’re reading this, you’re most likely an American. A...

     I’ve seen my share of accidents along this dangerous stretch of I-85 in upstate South Carolina. What I wasn’t fortunate enough to w...

     A s should be obvious by my reflective bloggery and general childishness, I am of the Nostalgia Geek Generation, those early Gen Xe...

     T here seems to be a psychological trifecta in the American holiday season, not unlike the Stages of Grief or the twelves steps ...

Like so many other podunk dirt farmers of their generation, my newlywed parents were eager to leave behind their rural childhoods ...