I've always been hopelessly American. I'm the guy who went to Europe and, after soaking in the slower, more nuanced approach to daily life and its pleasures, thought it was totally boring. The guy whose nearly-favorite thing to do ever (at least for a long time) was to drive around in a car, park in a parking lot and hang out, then get back in a ( Read more... )

Today marks the first of a series of entries (okay, five) in which I will lay out the five albums that have so greatly improved my life as to deserve a highly illustrious journal entry (hence the title). I will be writing about each album at length, so unless you're already a fan of my selections, prepare to be very bored by what you find, as in ( Read more... )

On second thought, I have a much better definition of maturity. Maturity is NOT BEING A STUPID JACKASS THAT CONTINUOUSLY MAKES CATASTROPHIC MISTAKES BY NOT THINKING AND NOT PAYING ANY DAMN ATTENTION TO WHAT HE'S DOING AT ANY GIVEN TIME.

Jesus Christ, when am I going to stop making these amazingly simple and idiotic errors?

Hear me out, urban poor. I'm not one of you, but you need to know what I know ( Read more... )

Scarduzio first met the guy on the curb of the Acme supermarket. He was buying onions and shallots and these fancy kinds of spices because his mom was learning to cook. His mom was sort of Italian but really she was just from Philadelphia. She couldn’t cook worth a damn, and now in her early fifties she’d been struck by a fit of culinary repentance ( Read more... )

When I found out my dog was sick, and was going to die from being sick, I wanted to kill him myself. I don't know why, but I couldn't stand the thought of someone else, a stranger, coming in from somewhere else to put my dog down. A stranger's hands taking his life, pulling plastic wrap off some clinical, commercially sterilized needle, my dog ( Read more... )

Did you see what I just did there? I posted my current musical selection under my entry! I don't think I've done that in about three years. When I started this journal I did it all the time, and I would almost always carefully handpick the song to create some kind of impression or cultivate an elaborate ideal-character for myself based on a very ( Read more... )

I received the most beautiful letter from an ex-girlfriend in the Peace Corps yesterday. It came all the way from Burkina Faso, one of those African nations with nothing, absolutely nothing: no resources to speak of, piss-poor farmland, endless problems with drought and insufficient water supplies, not even access to an ocean, as Faso is landlocked ( Read more... )

Man, you guys know this trend of high-concept, stylized non-fiction that just takes some minor historical incident or general thing that we all experience in life and spins it off into an entire book, a book that's psuedo-informational but really at its core just spins a ripping yarn or a series of ripping yarns? I think I need to get in on this ( Read more... )

Hey you! Are you a thrifty youth, "poor is cool" hipster type, or homeless guy? Are you plagued by a deep and persistent itch, an itch you can't quite scratch fully, an itch that runs so deep it may actually be subdermal, below your skin, perhaps located on the surface of a major organ such as the liver? Is this itch the ITCH TO TRAVEL? Do you like ( Read more... )