-
Above the Horizon: Postscript
Stop running away at the sight of this title, ya scaredy-blogger. Really. I’m done exhausting and exhuming the story of my grandma and dad. But at this point, before I move back to the usual programming of posts that detail how Jessica Alba is somehow like a Shamrock Shake–and other random pop culturized profundities that…
-
Above the Horizon: Part the Last
a My great-aunt Ethel and Grandma Dorothy as girls in Montan The Saturday after his mother’s memorial service, my Finnish father, who would regularly answer the direct question of “What are you thinking right now?” with “I don’t know,” talked to me about his life. As it turns out, he was more than just my…
-
Above the Horizon III
In the hour before the church service that would publicly memorialize my grandmother, we immediate family members left the windy cemetery and headed back to her bungalow, where she had lived since moving off the ranch more than thirty years earlier. As we all rattled around in her house, eating bars and leaning against her…
-
Above the Horizon II
(my grandma, Dorothy, third from the left, surrounded by her sisters in 1951; she was 36 in this photo, 5 years younger than I am now. Sweet Carol Channing, but I’m actually holding up pretty well. This is also the photo that one of my favorite large galpals once spotted hanging on the wall, a…
-
Above the Horizon I
I never felt particularly close to my paternal grandmother. She was pessimistic; she groused that I sat on the couch and read too much (“Don’t you ever go outside?”); and the candy jar in her living room only ever housed lemon drops and restaurant-style peppermint circles, which are the Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt…
-
Token Diet
Loathing my general wideness, I decided to try out “The Subway Diet.” It worked for that Jared dude, after all, and he looked pretty trim and tidy wearing his khakis and specs in all those commercials. So I committed to the Subway. But damn if I couldn’t choke down all those metal parts. The sliding…
-
California’s Recent Legalization of Gay Marriage
“In Which Jim, Who Has Previously Guest Blogged in This Space, Suggests His Lack of a Boyfriend Might Affect His Views on Social Issues, Specifically the State of California’s Recent Legalization of Gay Marriage” So, yea, my pal Jim (aka iJim) used to live in Duluth; he was my boss. Tired of the town and…
-
What Color Are My Parachute Pants?
It all started with the brown rice. There was a muttered conversation with Groom, a little talk that went something like, “Yea, okay, we eat a cow a week, so maybe sometimes we need to compensate by ingesting something uber healthy, like, you know, whole-wheat pasta.” Then we ate some whole-wheat pasta, and pretty quickly…
-
Ka-powie
In an age when Kevin Federline sets the standard as a guy to admire, I’m feelin’ the need to go all revolutionary like Mr. Muscle Oven Cleaner did back in the ’70s and take a moment to set the bar just a tidge higher. I can up your K-Fed, culturepeople, and his name is My…
-
Epizeudy Boogie-Woogie
When I think about the rhythm of my existence, the words “West Coast freestyle” cross my mind, as does a brief Lambadic beat, but ultimately I have to admit the cadence of my life is most aptly labeled “semesterlyish.” Back when I was in college, during the “who’ll-shove-Alexis-Carrington-into-a-fountain-this-week?” decade of the ’80s, I attended an…
