How to Fail the Pre-K Entrance Exams

As many of you know, I’m a pretty big deal journalist. I mean, not the kind of big deal whose name or stories you might recognize. Or who even writes for outlets you might recognize. But still, a pretty big deal. And like any big deal journalist, I have confidential sources. Super secret ones. Like, […]

Grickle Grass

Finding a decent bedtime story to read to your kid is harder than you might think. Most childrens books are either pointless (Superman likes red! Superman likes blue!), overproduced (A book with buttons and recorded dinosaur sounds! Wait, who made these recordings?), boring (Pokey the Bear showed Susie she had the strength the whole time!), […]

Hypocrisy, Hope, and Kids These Days

At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home […]

Savor All the Pieces of Moment

I recently bought a camera that prints pictures immediately upon exposing them. Remember those? It’s pretty fun, and it’s nice if, like me, you take a lot of pictures and then save them in your iCloud and forget to look at them. Or at least forget until your phone sends you an automated “memory,” and […]

Snark Week: Literally the Most Terrifying Creature on Earth

Imagine I was to describe a creature to you. Something truly terrifying. Something out of a nightmare that no amount of drunken elves could wash away. It’s small enough to hide almost anywhere in your house but big enough to crawl up onto your bed at night. It drools, shits and pisses everywhere it goes. […]

A Little Less than Free

The kids across the street are my special little pals. They climb all over me and believe the lies I tell them. We wrestle, take walks, get ice cream, talk about poop. I really love these two little guys—I’ve known them their whole lives–and I think they love me, too. It would be interesting to […]

Can You Hear Me Now Question Mark

The words you are reading have been typed by my own fingers, pressing little keys that make letters on my screen. If you really want to get into it, my keyboard is a little bit dirty. I don’t clean it often enough, and my kids use it a lot (I tell them to wash their […]