Blog Category:

In 1980, I visited President Jimmy Carter in the White House. I was obsessed with politics. With the people who worked so hard to be governor or senator or president. I think it was because I was insecure. I didn’t want to be just me. I wanted people to like me, to maybe even VOTE […]

There was a church across the street from where I lived. In the middle of a bad investing day, when my heart was pounding so bad I thought I would die, I would go to church. It was always empty. I’d get as close as possible to the statue of Jesus. I would touch his […]

“My boss came in and told me the police were waiting for me,” he said. He was very political and I thought, as these things go, that the police maybe didn’t like his politics. He was from another country if that counts. We were at breakfast. I didn’t know him too well and figured, OK, […]

“You can’t do that,” she told me. Cindy was a VP in the marketing department. I was on my way to see the CEO of HBO. I was a junior analyst programmer in the IT department. A very exciting job. I made $40,700 per year. It was 1995. I lived on a foam futon and […]

You decide to plagiarize one of the most successful books ever. You take a book that won the National Book Award and you retype it from scratch and pretend it’s yours. You submit it to 20 publishers. You put a fake name on it. 100% of the publishers send back rejection letters. They hated it! […]

The first Thanksgiving that I spent alone was right after I separated from my wife. By the end of that day I experienced: fear, loneliness, lying to thousands of people, and enjoying it. I woke up and I imagined my kids saying, “Is Daddy going to be with us?” They were tiny still. They didn’t […]

“He beat his wife to the point where her face was split open,” our friend told us at lunch. “Then they called a private doctor who came over to the house to sew up his wife’s face.” I was having a hard time picturing it. “How do you know?” I asked. “I spoke to the […]