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.

Here is another of the little essays I’ve written while waiting for my turn to get vaccines here is Spain.

Here is a purely silly little piece. I wrote it in the spirit of Jonathan Swift or the television shows The Good Place or Good Omens and I hope no one takes it seriously.

Here is a little essay I wrote when thinking about this year’s eruption of the Brood X cicadas in the eastern United States, an event that happens every seventeen years. I’ve taken a few literary liberties here: my actual birthday is in April, and I think that was 18 or 19 years old in the first photograph.

Oh my goodness. I think that we are all happy to turn our backs on 2020 and start looking forward to regaining a new normal in 2021.

One bright spot in my retirement life here in the paradise that is Asturias, Spain, is that I have finally finished a draft of my Art and Archaeology in the American Funny Pages. It is now up on my homepage as a rather large .pdf download. I would love to receive any feedback!