It’s that moment where I feel the virus dig in and take hold, the moment where I contemplate throwing myself out of a window—the moment when I realize I’ve got a cold, and I’m going to spend the next several days leaking. The shades come down with

I was home, but I had to eat fast—three men in Texas were waiting for me. It was more like ten, eight for sure—we’d pick up the last two if necessary—but three of them were in Texas and they were ready to get murderous. Dammit, I forgot the caffei

After an hour on the mat, I struggled to feel the jade working it’s magic, and as I pretended to imagine toxins leaving my body, I planned an escape. The mechanical bed was fit with pounds of jade stone, apparently blessed with flute music or some mysti

The man was a redneck, more so than the the kind Nebraska traditionally produced, like he was born over an ancient redneck burial ground, or grew up over a redneck fault-line of some sort. Taylor and I clicked right from the starting pistol, meeting at co

The rough looking Pizza Hut located about a mile from my home has been taken over—and successfully operated—by a hardcore metal band currently taking a break between albums. This is an assumption mind you, as I can find no alternative explanation for

Fifty paces from a coffee shop hawking overpriced sandwiches, I witness some kind of dusted-up vagrant using a Diet Coke can as a toilet, and it was then I knew I was downtown. The peoples of downtown live in a variety of converted housing, old rat hovels

Wild and rumbly, the car was an impostor, and when we sped together over back-county mountains, I knew it tried damned hard to keep me from killing myself. It was a fourteen-hundred dollar maroon behemoth, a 1978 Mercury Cougar with a cracked windshield t

My bulldog, whom I hold in higher regard than many of my contemporaries, looks as though he’s been living in a tire fire for the past six years. Dogs get skin infections, I now know, and dogs with wrinkles get them in horrible ways. What starts as a lit

Learning the fine art of the tobacco pipe can be a tremendously rewarding experience, just so long as you don’t look like a complete tool-bag while doing it. For nearly as long as our species has been roasting food over a fire, we’ve been altering the

While sitting in the front row and struggling to comprehend how one is expected to divide numbers using a little slash, it hit me like a chalkboard eraser to the eyeball: I was going to remain in the third grade for eternity.  It was wild how quickly I a