Here is another diatribe by a pedantic old Classicist:

Here is a new essay:

In keeping with my scatological theme, here is another silly poem:

Donald Trump Sits for his Official Portrait

The portrait sitter 

Sits on his sphincter,

Trying to hold it in.

Outside, the lightening flashes

But nobody hears

The thunder roar under his skin.

Here’s a silly little poem:

The Booger and the Turd

The Booger once said to the Turd:

“You’re disgusting in ways that I’m not.”

To which Turd did retort:

“I’ve heard people say,

‘That’s really good shit’,

But never ‘that’s really nice snot’.”

Here is a new short story. The story itself is only 7 1/2–pages long, but it is prefaced by an 11 1/2–page-long section on the history of suicides, in which I go off on some screeds about Job and Hamlet that I used to make back when I taught those works for two dozen years at BU, The Key School, and at River Valley Community College.

Here is a silly little piece about my evolving relationship with English grammar:

Like so many people my age, I am going through boxes of photographs that I have accumulated over the decades. Doing this has got me thinking about all of the hours I spent in a darkroom when I was a teenager, and this little story just popped into my head.

Psychologists say that uncertainty is one of the greatest stressors on mental health that we face in our lives. This certainly seems to be borne out with what we have all faced in this past pandemic year. And, although it is certain that we all will die some day, none of us knows when that day will come. But, if given the chance, would you want to know how much longer you have to live? In pondering this question, I have written this little short story.

With the Brood X cicadas now emerging in the mid-Atlantic east coast of the US, the Washington Post is sponsoring a poetry contest. Submitted poems about cicadas are to be less than 17 lines long. Here is my submission, written with the help of my wife:

Continuing my obsession with death, here is an essay I wrote after the trial of George Floyd’s murder.