white with foam

Pho Viet, Jackson Street, February 2011 With Karyn out of town on exciting business this week, I’ve been hoisting the freak flag to a reasonable height like only a middle-aged white guy can: staying up ’til nearly eleven, cooking unlikely food, leaving the seat up. I know, whoa there cowboy, right? Chauncey doesn’t know what [...]

“There is no hiatus between instinct and reason … a rational action is simply an instinctive response which has survived in a struggle with other instinctive responses aroused by a situation; ‘deliberation’ is merely the internecine strife of rival impulses. At bottom, reason and instinct, and life, are one.” — Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, [...]

I don’t want to give away the ending, but there’s some wisdom in this article I wish I’d had before. And by ‘before,’ I don’t mean, like, twenty years ago. I mean before I proudly donned my so-stylish dunce cap even this morning. By the same token, I’ll try to heed the inherent warning to [...]

Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own. [...]

A number of years ago, one of my favorite musicians, country outsider Robbie Fulks, made an offhand comment that has really stuck with me. It was one of those lulls where the band is retuning and the requests are flying. Inevitably, someone shouted for “Fuck This Town,” Fulks’ biting, wounded response to Nashville’s indifference to [...]