[stextbox id=”download” caption=”Journal, August 2002″] “You know why I like being with you? All my other friends are noisy. You’re quiet.” ~Jamie Jamie is here today, taking a nap next to me on my futon in the living room. It’s nice to have her here with me. I wish Jamie would come over and occupy the futon…

Did You Know? Most people know many of the street names for marijuana, such as grass, weed, reefer, dope, dagga, Mary Jane, roach, Texas tea, Astroturf, bhang, ganja, home grown, J, and roach. But there are a number of other monikers, including slag, network, potus, filth, the animal, dreck, sissy, lamb, talcum, the itchy, mighty…

Journal, December 14, 1993… I came home to discover a drunk passed out in Rhonda’s parking spot. I knocked on Rhonda’s door. “Rhonda, do you know whose body this is?” “Maybe you should go inside. What if he’s got a gun? Don’t let him shoot you!” She added that she heard a scuffle and locked…

When I was about 14 and my sister Nicole was about 11, we started writing and drawing in a spiral notebook that we kept under her bed. We wrote in it off and on for several years. It was an ideal fusion of the “Amy plus Bobby 2gether 4ever” type notes you see scribbled on…

Alternate title: How to Win Cute Girls’ Hearts in High School This is a great story, a great moment, a seminal moment. In tenth grade, I applied for a position on the yearbook staff at my high school, Eisenhower High School, the following year. The Talon was a decently prestigious yearbook, and I wanted to write,…

These are notes from one time I went to dinner with my friends with whom I later formed the writing group called Robert’s Frost. Pink = Audrey  | Green = Shana | Blue = Richard | Red = Merida Mickey Hamstrings the Pope by Minimus 7.0.1 In the future, everything will be made from leather; leather furniture, leather kitchen utensils, leather…

I don’t want what you have. I want who you are. What do you expect from me? Isn’t it enough that I insist on putting myself on your front porch, wimpering like a wet, hungry puppy? The quiet cool of this night has surrounded me, isolated me, captured me, holding me in this envelope of…

As my years have gone by as a news photographer, I have become more and more comfortable in my community, and I believe I am pretty well known. I might even say that I am closer to my town and its people than most news photographers. One thing that kind of amazes me in recent…

“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because…

Last year I plucked a couple of abandoned cellular telephone company antennas off a roof of a downtown building after the owner said I could have them. I was eager to take apart the omnidirectional one, about which I posted last October. Today I had a few extra minutes, so I decided to take apart…

As my faithful readers know, when I was younger, I made audio tapes. Some of them were semi-scripted, like The Willie Do-It Show or Invasion of the Polka-Dot People, and others were just ad lib. Players along with me were my sister Nicole, and my friends Keith, Billy, and Michael. One of the very first tapes…

Journal, June 23, 1992… “Do you feel it when I hold you? -Me “Sometimes.” -GF In October 1992, I drove to New Mexico to be with a woman who claimed she’d been sexually abused as a child and as a result was spending a month at a treatment center. We begin with my drive to…

It was September 1978 when Eisenhower High School English Teacher Gil Hernandez assigned my English II class to write in a journal three times a week. Less that a year later I almost lost the damn thing. Dad let me take his car to school. It was the Cadillac our family bought years earlier for…

I know, I know. Nerdy, yes. But I love antennas. The big antennews is twofold… • Bates Electronics installed the Icom IC-2820H dual band amateur radio in my Nissan Juke, along with two antennas. I had them install two antennas for two reasons; 1) I like antennas, and 2)the IC-2820H has a diversity receive feature that allows…

Updated after my writing friend Cody had a poem accepted by the White Winged Dove: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology. The announcement said, “Hello poets and priests of nothing,” taken from a lyric in a song that is at the center of this story. This is a rewrite of the original draft, which remains private….

“Did You Know?”When I become overlord, all clocks will be set and locked to standardized solar mean time at the exact conterminous center of my new supernation, the Central Unified National Territory (C.U.N.T.), and this unit of time will be named after me as “Dick Time.”

Another pile of dreck from the blue filigree notebook, marked for my reference in fuchsia and powder-blue Post-It notes. Sigh… I want someone to tell it’s alright, even when it’s not. “At least it’s intense.” -Kathy, 1986 “At least you know you’re alive.” -Ann (who is no longer alive), 2002 I look at pictures of…

There’s a scene near the beginning of The Paper Chase in which the protagonist, Timothy Bottoms, sneaks into a closed area of a library at Harvard Law School. He climbs through a window and down onto a type of configurable floor called a deck, where he intends to read law books that are not available…

Bumper sticker: Gone Crazy, Back Soon Okay, settle down everyone. Here are some more notes from the blue filigree notebook: Laura believes Dick has killed the last of a rare species of insect on their windshield. In the end, I don’t deny I have it coming. I hold grudges clutched tightly to my sweet, perfumed…