Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

Say his name. Say you've seen him walking down Central, blending in with college kids, men who party early and often and now, look at news stories, social media feeds and his arrest in Roosevelt Park on a Friday afternoon. Say fifteen years ago you and he were regulars in a dive bar on a regular week night and you danced to a band that a lot of people found fun,   just to get away from a lonely life and path that didn't at all look familiar. Say you'd talk on the patios, the bars that hadn't kicked him out and you never knew his name. Say his name. Say you'd see him, run into him at Walgreen's. He'd ask you to buy him beer, hand you cash. He'd lost his license and knew you as a familiar, friendly face. Say you turned away passed off the request, mumbling as you walked by. He seemed a little bit lost, and you felt it just wasn't right, like drinking wasn't also a way that you passed time.. S...

On Being a Writer                 I’m not sure why, but at an obviously weak moment when I was 17 years old I sat down at my desk and wrote a story.   And after no editing, revising, creative writing classes, or real encouragement from any real writers or teachers, no ambition, discipline or any reasonable degree of aptitude  announced –to myself mostly –and my best friend, “I want to be a writer.”                 I wish I’d never uttered that phrase.   Some ____ years later, I’m saddled with the weight of that phrase.   I had no idea what I was getting into.   I mean, this is America.  No one really writes anymore, or at least how I imagined writing to be.   Stephen King or Mary Higgins Clark don’t write; they work:  8 hours a day, complex formulas, books out on deadlines, b...