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Reflective Prose: Fascination, And Dangerous Weather

Springtime hits hard in some quarters. I call this 'dangerous weather'—like, you've got to watch out where you're going. You might trip and fall. Somehow this always coincides with the rise of halters and midriff shirts.

Fascination, you know, is a universal feeling. I hesitate to call it an emotion, it's more than that, it's a condition, a thesis. It's strongly rooted in our biology, I think. I'm sure our closest animal relations feel it the same way we do. It's tough to know what's on a housecat's mind most of the time, but when he's gazing at that fish swimming around that bowl, I know exactly where his head is. And it's not "I'm hungry" or "how can I get that?" or "in a moment I shall execute my plan", as you might think. It's not something that rational, like when he wants something—in that case he meows, shuffles…

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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…

Creative Nonfiction Portfolio
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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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Reflective Prose: Day Nights

I gotta do something about them day nights.

I was just walking home from the store, bopping down the street at 11 PM, a time that I grew up believing was a sensible time to be in bed. 1 AM used to be alien terrain, exotic, strange. 2 AM—well, that might as well have been a million o'clock. It was like the furthest frontier. The night might have gone on forever beyond that, for all I knew, ending only when the last human had decided to go to bed before we could all wake up in the daylight again.

Nowadays the small hours of the morning are familiar to me. More than familiar—ordinary, 1 AM no more mysterious than 1 in the afternoon (and probably not as mysterious as 10 AM, a time I haven't seen in many months but that somehow still fails to hold a fascination for me.)…

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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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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…