The best financial advice I ever received was from a guy who had just woken up alongside a riverbank after a 3-day bender where he and a buddy had consumed more than 5 gallons of beer via a Party Ball, which is exactly what it sounds like—a huge ball full…

When I was 16 my head caught on fire. It was around the 4th of July and my parents had left town on a family vacation that I’d usually take part in, but that year I was old enough to stay home alone and I’d also recently discovered booze. A…

I wonder sometimes whether birds experience jealousy, as when I recently saw an American goldfinch looking dashing in its spring regalia, balancing on the lip of a backyard birdbath. Looking curiously across at him was a house sparrow, who appeared to be wearing an old burlap sack. Surely the house…

I always struggle when a homeless person asks me for money. Do I give it to them? Will this enable their current endeavor, rather than assist them in moving beyond this lifestyle so that they, like me, can live a productive and fulfilling life, giving back to society every single…

The key to writing, I think, is to put pen to paper—to just sit down and write. If your fingers keep moving, your brain will eventually catch-up and make sense of it.  Years ago, when I was living in Alaska in 1999-2000, I went to hear the humorist and author…

I usually have an assortment of condiment packets in my vehicle leftover from fast food drive-through visits that might have occurred within the last month or even the last year. I don’t eat fast food often, but I do appreciate neatly packaged flavor pods, and I like that the (often)…

Mondays always feel like an existential crisis, and even more so if your weekend didn’t go as planned. The truth is, I accomplished very little this weekend, unless you consider the ending of a relationship an accomplishment. In which case, I accomplished that. But even that accomplishment I can’t claim…

Has anyone ever finished a jar of salsa, or does one after another get pushed to the back of the fridge, until one day you open a jar and see that it is now a petri dish, mold and all, confirming your suspicions and allowing you to finally toss it…

It’s plant buying season, and not just outdoor plants or plants for the garden, but indoor plants, too. After every winter, several of my houseplants inevitably give up trying to survive in what is at best a hostile environment. They have too much water, or not enough. They get no…

Today I started to notice little green buds tipping off on trees. The sun was out and it felt like spring. A white squirrel tip-toed his way to a bird bath outside my back porch and helped himself to some water. Surely that’s a sign. That this is real spring. …

Out driving today, I saw in the distance a big banner draped from a home’s front deck that read “Pro-Choice.” As I got nearer, I could see the banner also included a little graphic of a worker on a roof, presumably shingling, because under that it said, in small font,…