Mirrors & Mountains
My phone was on the bathroom counter while I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror. I stood there studying myself in the most mundane and unattractive of moments. My phone lit up...
Category: Health
The other part of the reflection
The brush at the old Palms poker room led me to my seat one late night several years ago. The seven-seat at the table was the only open chair in the room, and it...
Mistakes
This is a story of two mistakes with eternal consequences. They happened almost exactly three years ago, but I’ve never written about them publicly. There are a lot of things that happen when somebody...
Where there’s smoke…
This question, as all good questions do, begins with a cast iron skillet. My wife is-and this is putting it in a way only a loving and understanding husband can-security conscious. When I buried...
Finish line
“I am as nervous as I’ve ever been.” That was my son this morning, up before the sun for his first youth triathlon. At eight years old, he would be among the youngest of...
On getting naked
I could not have been more naked. Six months ago, I stood behind an open car door. It was the only thing blocking my man-parts from an entire grass-field-turned-parking-lot full of people on a...
Notes on fear
The note read, “If I die.” Nothing else. There was no last will and testament. There were no instructions. There was only a flower blossom picked from somewhere else. I was soaked with sweat...
Alarm
The roundest person in the entire gym was the firefighter who came to save our lives this morning. He was 350 pounds if he was an ounce. The sweaty struggle it must have been...
Those aren’t ants in my pants
It’s a little more than 17 miles of county roads–open fields, farm land, red barns, private air strips, luxury homes, views of the Blue Ridge mountains, moo cows, and lose-yourself hairpin turns–between Campbell’s covered...
The life cycle of a vomiter
Stage 1: The body’s will–Notable during the first several years of a child’s life, Stage 1 is exhibited by body and mind exhibiting no will as it relates to vomiting. What wants to come...
The Dennis DeYoung Dilemma
I’m sitting at a poker table. Or a bar. Or at the gate waiting for a plane. It doesn’t matter, because I ask the same question in all of these places and more. “If...
Pine Nut Mouth
I blamed the banana, and I blamed it in a number of four-letter ways that would’ve made my mom wash my mouth out with brands of soap only familiar to Russian intelligence agencies and...
The Irrational Machine
Every weekday morning at 7:30am on the nose, John Smith (not his real name) gets up from the same spot on his bed. He showers with a clean wash cloth, washes under the same...
St. Francis Hospital responds…but not to us
Greenville, South Carolina’s Bon Secours St. Francis Health System is proud of its record. Its hospitals deliver 2,100 babies every year, nearly one baby for every employee of the hospital. Its stated mission is...