A long, curvy, illustrated trip through life and food addiction.
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BACK IN THE OLDEN DAYS , when newspapers still had whole sections devoted to book reviews, I had the privilege of being the book review editor of our city’s metro daily. The core of the job was to select what amounted to about 10 books a week to be reviewed from the bids for coverage that came from publishers everywhere, constantly, all. The. Time. So recently, when I noticed that the Goodreads…
LET'S SAY YOU'RE SORTING LAUNDRY . Three baskets sit before you, but instead of clothing, you’re sorting what you think of as your life’s failures. Into the first basket go your useful failures: the awful corporate job, say, that led you to fulfilling work as an entrepreneur. The starter marriage that taught you what it takes to be a good spouse. Into the second basket, toss all the efforts that…
Grab a lovely drawing or painting for yourself and help me tidy up
IS IT TOO EARLY TO DECLARE THIS “Our Summer of Becoming a T.C. Boyle Plot?” Man-versus-nature is one of the themes Boyle returns to now and again in his novels and short fiction. The title story in his collection Tooth and Claw is a phantasmagorical yarn about a young man who wins an African wildcat called a serval and sets it up in his apartment bedroom with hopes his love interest will help him…
On Loving this Big, Wonderful, Troublesome Nation at 250 and Beyond
A page from my sketchbook THERE MIGHT BE SOME DARK ROCKS to turn over in the life of beloved British artist David Hockney, but I don’t know them and I’m disinclined to look. Hockney has left behind a massive trove of work distinguished by an uncommon vibe – smart and joyful. I think this explains his pull on international art audiences. Hockney died June 11 at age 88. The cause has yet to be…
A Friday-appropriate quick look at a special project
THE PEACE YOU NEED might be at the bird feeder. At first it might look like a flurry of interchangeable brown birds arguing over too-few perches, scrambling for seed, flitting and fleeing on a hundred whims. Fallen morsels attract sparrows on the ground, too, where they need not compete for real estate until a mourning dove arrives to command them with its bulk and to flash a patch of feathers…
MY HUSBAND CAME HOME LAST WEEK with a bruise on his chin that I think we all should celebrate. Mere months away from his 83rd birthday Carlo took up pickleball. The bruise was the result of him wanging his face with his racquet, to which I say bravo! An octogenarian who can hurt himself in a new sport might just be a model for anyone who has made it past what can reasonably be referred to as…
LAST FALL I DECIDED TO SEE what all the GLP-1 fuss was about, so I used an online pharmacy to order compounded semaglutide (akin to Ozempic). I received a vial of liquid and a bunch of needles and syringes with instructions to begin with a low starter dose. Within a couple days, I noticed that the familiar hum of food noise had disappeared. One afternoon I came this close to forgetting to eat…
