Exquisite Corpse

In 2017, I started delivering the West End Phoenix . . . because at 56, all I really wanted was the simplicity again of being nothing more ...

Skiz and I were having pedicures when we were invaded.  By one of those trendy sleeping-bag/bedspread tarps. It wore a lady. A Mini Her alon...

I glanced up and noticed the woman slathering Nivea onto her chin. The seats around her were empty. Next time I looked, she’d worked it in...

I remember when all I had to remember was my home address and my seven-digit land-line telephone number. Now I’ve got hundreds of online a...

On July 28, 1972, you might’ve seen a full-page ad in the paper that read, “Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. the Royal Bank will open and never c...

Pip the Cat came from a hoarding situation in North Bay. That’s all we knew until this week, when a pal told me that in a six-degrees-of-sep...

Inside my skull, every heartbeat strikes like a timpani mallet. Outside, it is blindingly bright. Sunlight pierces my eyeballs with the forc...

Outside the tiniest of snowflakes float. Inside, sunlight from the window hits the dust motes hovering above the hot air vent. The furnace ...

By the time I decided to shave off my first real beard, I’d pretty much forgotten how—mostly because I’d started growing it not long after I...

Some women have good legs. Others have nice hair. I have a beautiful décolletage. Despite a decade of sunny seasons as an archaeologist. Not...

In pursuit of sporting greatness, I could not rely on talent, of which, the evidence demonstrated, I had little. Luck, then. To attract it, ...

One drizzly March day, laden with shopping bags, I reached my street corner when I noticed a group of women gabbing on the sidewalk across f...

At an intersection in the hood, people are mesmerized. Jaws are dropping. Arms straightened out, fingers pointing. They are halting their ...

How lucky was she to have a boyfriend so cool and so confident that he didn’t care what the dullards around him might think, who had such a ...

A band of rogues, were they, everything a ribald brag or pun-ish diss. Fact or fiction, it mattered not. Lewd mockery and exaggeration were ...

Once, when I worked at a hospital Charitable Foundation drafting fundraising reports with impossible deadlines, I found in the break room a ...

My workplace wants to start a dialogue about menopause. Why? Purportedly because we need to de-stigmatize it. For fuck’s sake it’s not an ED...

If you’ve even heard of Nelson Algren, it’s likely because of his Three Rules of Life: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at...

We all had nicknames growing up. Mine was Peanut Head, mercifully truncated to Peanut by about grade four. Through Rich I’ve realized that n...

Roger often thought about the band, and what they could have been, if creative differences hadn’t derailed them. They always argued over  ev...