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Forever In My Heart: Experiencing Jimi
Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal EvidenceTravel & AdventureMemoirs & Reflections

A Memoir From The Road: Forever In My Heart: Experiencing Jimi

November 27, 2018

I'm staying at my dad's place in Florida right now. I've been on the road for a few months.

It struck me this morning, waking up in Dad's guest room, that this past August I let the 25th anniversary of the day I first quit th' job and hit th' road—August 12, 1993—slip by, unremarked upon.

I realized it today because today is the 25th anniversary of November 27 of that same year, nearly as important a day in my personal canon. I slept the night of November 26, 1993 in my car in a rest area outside of Tacoma, WA, as I'd been doing for the better part of a week, and after my customary free cup of morning coffee courtesy of the local VFW post volunteers at the rest area, I headed over to the Last Exit On Brooklyn cafe in Seattle's University District, as…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Short Vignettes & Anecdotes
Timeslippin’ With Gene
Posted inWriting Posted in genresUnexplainedMemoirs & Reflections

Things That Make You Say "Hmmmmm": Timeslippin’ With Gene

This is a true thing that happened to me. And better, it happened to me and a friend together, so there's a corroborating witness.

Back in high school, me and my friends Chris, whom I call Gene, and Scharf made plans to hang out at Gene's house after school. Gene and I both had 9th period free, so we met at the beginning of 9th period in the SWAS room. Scharf had said he'd meet us there at the end of 9th period, the last period of the day.

I was in an alternative education program, School Within A School, in high school. It was in a big room with couches instead of desks, no grades, etc., it's a whole other story. But SWAS met for the first few periods of the day, and after that, the SWAS room, full of couches, was a…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Short Vignettes & Anecdotes
These Are The People In My Neighborhood
Posted inWriting Posted in genresPortrait GalleryMemoirs & Reflections

These Are The People In My Neighborhood

Some assorted reminscences of characters I occasionally run across in my day.

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Local Color: True Stories From Near And Far
How to Find Your Hotel If You’re Lost In Ghent
Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal EvidenceTravel & Adventure

Local Color—Ghent, Belgium: How to Find Your Hotel If You’re Lost In Ghent

Back in my salad days I once tricked the Belgian government into paying to fly me & two friends to give an arts lecture in Ghent under assumed names (long story, now recounted elsewhere on this site).

The Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Vooruit Arts Center), where we delivered our address, was an elegant old 1910 festival hall in Ghent, with galleries and lecture halls above and a bar in the basement, and which had once been used by the Nazis during the occupation.

The folks from Vooruit put us up in a 300-year-old hotel where hotel owners' incredibly classy cafe on the first floor kept us both caffeinated and entertained, with live a cappella opera singers, and the hotel part was reached by going through a door in the back of a closet.

Just a block or two from the hotel was a row of several…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Short Vignettes & Anecdotes
The Funniest Man In The World
Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal EvidencePortrait Gallery

These Are The People In My Neighborhood: The Funniest Man In The World

The other night I talked to my old friend Zigmo Parcheesi, the funniest man in the world. He told me he took his toddler son Max to his first movie. "Oh, yeah?" I asked. "What did you choose to scar him with?"

"Porn. We took him see some hardcore pornography. Told him we were going to show him how he was made. 'Not like that.... not like that... not like that... Yes! Like that!... No, no, not like that!... Not like that... not like that...'"

A few years ago, Zigmo moved out to the edge of the woods in northern New Jersey. I asked him, "New Jersey? have you seen the jersey devil yet?"

Without missing a beat, he said, "No, I haven't seen the jersey devil, but I have been to the mall."

Later, before getting off the phone, he told me, "If you ever…

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Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal Evidence

Local Color—Yee Haw: Texas

I'll tell you about Texas. Back in '95, me and my friend Haley went down to his Dad's timeshare in Port Aransas, Texas, a little beach resort town about 45 minutes south of Corpus Christi, for a week of sportfishing on the gulf. So, the first night in town, we go out on the town, hit a bunch of bars. We come to this one bar, where they tell us they haven't got their liquor license yet, so, by some strange twist of Texan logic, all drinks cost $2.

So we go and have a drink. And behind the bar, there's this girl, it's not politically correct but I can only describe this girl as a "Texas honey"—pretty, curly blond hair, cowboy hat. And we're there a few minutes, and this older guy starts hassling us, making drunken accusations, saying we're with the liquor board or something, and the only…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Local Color: True Stories From Near And Far
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal Evidence

Local Color—Manhattan: New York Stories, Which I Only Now Realize Are All About Petty Crimes

Originally posted on my old site. I'd have called this "New York After Dark", but the souvlaki guy story happened in the middle of the afternoon.

Back in the '80s & early '90s New York City was much different than it is now. Filthy, violent, and the meat packing district was a not a place you went after dark. I used to jot down my day-to-day experiences there. I truthfully didn't realize, until I collected a few of them together on this page, how, uh, bad it was. (And I'll tell you what, these are the milder stories that are fit for public consumption and won't scare my mom if she reads this site. Take me out for a beer sometime and I'll tell you some real stories.)

Looking out for the homeless

After a night of shooting on a small movie I was doing sound…

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Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal Evidence

Local Color—Seattle: Irene & Sheri

This was originally posted on my old website, Life In A Mikeycosm.

Before you read this, I should warn you. This story contains one of the grossest things I've ever heard. By the end of the story, things improve and it winds up as one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me... but if you're at all sqeamish, if you're the sort of person who just can't watch some of David Cronenberg's best movies, you really might want to skip this one.

This is all true. I swear to you. This has not been exaggerated or distorted for the sake of a good narrative... no embellishment could supersede the actual events. Although, one change I made is to divide what happened into three acts, for narrative purposes. It didn't happen that way originally, it was just one thing and then another, one long…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Short Vignettes & Anecdotes
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresSelf-Portraits In Prose

Question of the day: When was the first time you noticed someone cheating at something?

A few years back, my friend Al Katkowski was something of a success with his "Question Of The Day" iphone app and subsequent book. This was a question from the book.

Question of the day: When was the first time you noticed someone cheating at something?

Actually, the first person I noticed cheating would be myself. I totally figured it out on my own before ever seeing anyone else do it. I think I got my first inkling when I was 4 and tried to tell my friend Stephen Axeman I was 4 1/2, not 4, because I thought it made me sound grownup. Somehow he knew I wasn't 4 1/2! So when I turned 4 1/2, I told him again, and he said, "Yes, today you are." I never found out how he knew exactly when my half-birthday was, but it was an epiphany that mysterious means…

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Writing » Anecdotal Evidence (True Stories) » Local Color: True Stories From Near And Far
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Posted inWriting Posted in genresAnecdotal Evidence

Local Color—San Francisco: Tales From The Sidewalks Of San Francisco

An Afternoon At The Races, Unplanned

So, last night I was standing on Mission in South of Market with my phone out, trying to find a nearby hardware store, when off in the distance, maybe a block behind me, I thought I heard a voice yell, "Stop!"

My mind went off into a daydream for a second—what if there's a thief coming my way, and I get to trip him up? But wait—what if the "thief" is actually a victim in danger, being chased by a criminal, and I'd be helping the criminal by stopping him? What should I do? I didn't have time to think more than that, though, because from a half a block away, clearly now, I heard a panicked man's voice: "Stop!"

Now, I had my phone in one hand, which is chained to my belt, and my very heavy briefcase slung over my back, so…

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Posted inWriting Posted in genresMemoirs & Reflections

Essay-Length Memoir: Ars Moriendi—Haley’s Epitaph

Disclaimer, 2023

Having come a long way from the days related herein, I thought for a while before reposting this 26-year-old piece of writing, originally posted on my old website.

I think it has merit as a piece of my own writing and as a remembrance of someone I liked and cared about, despite how difficult he sometimes made it. But now that I'm doing things online under my real name, I do have to stop occasionally and think twice about how some of the less conventional anecdotes from my youth might be misinterpreted. I lead a very quiet life nowadays, but when you do business with people, sometimes you find yourself in an unwanted relationship with someone who loves dirt, reasonable or not, and you'll get painted as a bad guy by certain of those people only because they feel it may profit them to do…

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Posted inWriting Posted in genresMemoirs & Reflections

Essay-Length Memoir: “The Light Shone On Me”

Foreword:

For some reason, I've always been particularly moved by a sense of loss. It's the sole valuable observation I ever got from a kindly but not particularly effective therapist I saw for a while in my 30s, one of the few deep and profoundly true things about myself I hadn't already excavated on my own in my decades of frequent navel-gazing before that.

I've always written a lot—although I never considered myself a writer, so much as just someone who writes things down a lot—and in my 20s I had started occasionally writing longer essays, when I felt moved to. At a certain point, a few years after writing this one, I believe, I realized the longer pieces that I always felt were the most successful, the ones I had labored in love over and really eventually did manage to express what I had set out to…

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