So, I was driving home from helping Jon Jon and Kallie move, and I pulled into a gas station on San Pablo to fill the tank. As I was finishing and preparing to leave (credit card back in wallet, road trip trash thrown away), one of those huge SUV’s Ponte Vedra women drive to […]
With Susan, Dee and Kim I’ll admit yesterday was a bit of an anticlimax. I felt genuinely weird all day – a feeling I couldn’t pinpoint or shake until it hit me that – everything has changed and nothing has changed. I’m sounding a bit like Yoda again, but as Dee put it, “Whatever it […]
Today is my one year sober anniversary. It feels like a big deal to me, but oftentimes when I tell someone I’m a year sober*, they feel the need to say they know someone who’s been alcohol-free for like 37 years. As if in the grand scheme of boozy achievements, a year is small potatoes – I should […]
…was one of Lauren’s favorite stories when she was a little girl. Don’t ask. Other children liked Green Eggs and Ham or if they were feeling particularly racy, Where the Wild Things Are; my child would curl up with her binky and her beat up, stuffed Little Beethoven (still has them), and ask me […]
I consider myself to be a polite person. I was raised in the Midwest where simple, good manners were expected. I was married to an Englishman. I say “please” and “thank you” regularly. I’ve even added the southern-born “sir” and “ma’am” suffixes to my salutations – something that works extremely well on Jacksonville cab drivers […]
I was on TV yesterday. For the first time. The Jacksonville Channel 4 Morning Show was kind enough to invite me to tell my story and plug Waking Up the Ghost. I was told to be at the station at eight A.M., so I did what I do every time I have an important early event […]
Kim says I have OCD. I say I like a really, really cleanly swept front porch and toilet paper points. These are personal preferences. If they were disorders, I would wake up in the middle of the night and check all the bathrooms for scraggly paper. Or I’d worry about everyone else’s toilet paper. […]
…thinking about and talking about and writing about drinking. Or not drinking. Let’s talk about art. Lauren and I went to Jim Draper’s Opening at KORK yesterday. Mark George was there, and Jeff Whipple and as we were talking, one of them turned to Lauren and said, “I think we were bad influences on […]
I read somewhere that the Warning Labels on cigarettes are actually a subliminal advertisement: people smoke because it’s dangerous. It made me ponder (till my ponder-er got sore). Can the same be said for wine? Why did I used to drink? One: It was something to do with my hands. For as long as […]
Kim has recently begun emailing me pictures of myself from several years ago, in various stages of inebriation. I think it is designed (like the ghastly, crash scene photos they make you look at in driving school) to scare me straight. And truth be told, they are very funny. These old photos have made me recast my thinking about […]