Thanks to my good friend Jim Higley of the Bobblehead Dad Radio Show for this great interview:
http://bobbleheaddad.com/bobblehead-dad-radio/radio-and-now-we-shall-do-manly-things
And to Mark Perzel and the crew at WVXU for this one:
http://www.wvxu.org/post/and-now-we-shall-do-manly-things#.ULN97g6Ftn0.facebook
NOTE: I recently came across an old disc containing about 20 pieces of short fiction I wrote when I was a young, naive reporter. Right of college, the writing is a bit rough, but I like looking back at these stories and will share them sometime under the headline ‘Fiction from a Decade Ago:’ followed by the story name. Enjoy, or don’t. Cheers – CJH
Mike Hubble held the door for a little, though not old, woman and then scooted passed her in the breezeway to repeat the chivalrous act. He let the second door close automatically behind him and paused for a moment next to the display of sales circulars for a full breath of the familiar air. Every drug store smells the same, an antiseptic mix of floor cleaner and stale perfume. The aroma appealed to him.
He did not need a basket, though he took one and handed it to the woman from the doorway, whom the sales clerk had greeted as Helen. Their paths then diverged as Mike went right toward the pharmacy and Helen turned left toward the display of half-price Halloween candy in front of the cash registers.
Ordinarily, it’s a five to six second walk from the front of the store to the back corner where the pharmacy is, but Mike made it in four flat. He was in a hurry.
“How can I help you?” the girl behind the counter said. Mike had seen Read the rest of this entry »
I first read this in college, while pledging my fraternity. We were given the assignment to go around to all the upper classmen and interview them, talk to them, get them to sign our pledge paddles. Most of the conversations were dull, boring – how’s the weather? What’s your favorite team?
Except J.D.
J.D. struck me as a jock. He drove a pick-up truck and worked out until his t-shirts were tight around his biceps. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s the god damned chicken. And those rice noodles, the mi fun with the green onion and fried egg. Those are what get me every time. It’s not real Chinese food. It can’t be. I’ve never been to China, but I know that this can’t be the way things are there. This has got to be some other thing – an immigrant’s image of what an American would like in a Chinese restaurant. Like when someone who has never left L.A. tries to write a sit-com that will appeal to Heartland. It’s based on a guess. An educated guess, but a guess just the same.
I tried to give it up, tried to make a pact with myself to never go back. But I’m a junkie for the stuff and, like a junkie, I’ve got my little ritual. Read the rest of this entry »
He’s standing uncomfortably close, inches from my face. It’s closer than is reasonably comfortable for most people. Entirely too close for someone like me, who has intimacy issues. He’s broken the barrier, that safe distance I keep around myself in situations like this – most situations anyway. He won’t let me look away, won’t let me break eye contact. Every time I move my head, he moves. Every time I look down, he bends at the waist, cranes his neck and looks up into my eyes. And his voice, it’s too direct, penetrating. He won’t let me brush him off.
“You’re getting screwed,” he says. It’s a statement, not a question or an inference. It’s plain as day. Straight fact. “You’re getting screwed,” he repeats. And in that moment we’re not standing in a crowded kitchen, at a casual summer time house party on a Friday night. My wife is not standing to my side awkwardly trying to make small talk with his wife Read the rest of this entry »
We were just finishing packing up the car to head back to our house in Cincinnati when Dad asked me to go downstairs with him.
When I was young and my dad would call me down into his workshop, it usually meant trouble. Maybe my grades had been less stellar than I had led him to believe. Or maybe I had stretched the truth a bit about completing my chores. Either way, a trip into the workshop with Dad seldom resulted in warm, fuzzy father-son bonding – more likely it was a disappointed glare and good long talking-to.
But that was then. Now that I’m married and have three children, visits to the workshop usually involve a woodworking project Read the rest of this entry »
There are times when I catch myself thinking like I’m much older than I actually am, times when ill say or do something that makes me seem like the type of guy who mows his lawn in Bermuda shorts, hurraches and long black socks. This is one of those times. That I know what I’m about to write sounds like the semi lucid rambling a of a Korean War veteran is clear. So is the fact that i just don’t give a shit.
I know it seems like futile rancor to complain about the state of the modern world and I usually try to avoid it, particularly If such complaining involves broad sweeping statements about broad swaths of humanity. But I can’t help but wonder where our society is going each an every time I witness or overhear or walk through the fart like waft of the kind of rudeness and self indulgent douche baggery that I often experience among men in their thirties and forties, Read the rest of this entry »
I have never given a commencement speech. I’ve never been contact by a principal or student body president, professor or advisory and asked to put on a cost and tie, stand at a dais and encourage the future middle class to shoot for the stars and change their dreams no matter what.
I’m actually pretty happy about this. I’m happy that I’ve never been called upon to speak in this kind of situation for a few reasons, not the least of which is e simple fact that graduation speakers are boring. No one is listening and, if they are and unless you are Anthony Bourdain or Seth Macfarlane, no one will remember either you or the content of your message. High school graduates are too busy looking forward to college and freedom and beer and random hook ups with drunk members of the opposite sex. College graduates are freaking out about joining the real world and are trying to figure out ways to extend their lifestyles of freedom and beer and random hook ups with members of the opposite sex. Well, that’s not entirely true or fair. Read the rest of this entry »
I like to fly. I don’t do it all that often- admittedly more in the last few years than in the preceding decade when work was local and money was tight and there wasn’t a whole lot of need to go anywhere and no means to to, just for the sake of want. I like the process, the routine. I like the wait in the security line and that nervous, anticipatory feeling of wondering if I will be abler to cover the half-mile distance between the little stand where the unsettlingly indifferent TSA worker – who looks like she took a government job after being rejected for a position as a greeter at Walmart – scans that little blue flashlight over my drivers license and the gate in the allotted time. I love the moment of weightlessness when you step onto the moving sidewalk and begin gliding along and the suddenly gravity of stepping off. I like the last trip to the bathroom, the cattle- like jockeying for position when they call your loading zone and the fake-ass greeting from the tired and bemused flight attendant on leg three of a four-legged journey from her Atlanta hotel room to her next hotel in Nashville via New York LeGuardia and Salt Lake City.
I like sitting by the window and looking down on the pillow-top clouds, the new shades of blue that line the curving horizon like subtle mascara, the way hills and tree-covered mountains look like angular, two-dimensional drawings, Read the rest of this entry »
Right now, I’m sitting at a cramped two person booth in an insanely busy and improbably small restaurant in downtown Cincinnati. I have never been here before. I have never driven by, never added to a list of places I want to try. I was not, fifteen minutes ago, aware that Sophia’s Deli & Restaurant even existed and I only discovered it then because I decided that today – a rainy, cool but not cold late- September Tuesday – I wanted to do something with m lunch break ot
her than go someplace I know to eat. I had hoped, when I got to the office this morning, to wander aimlessly around the city. My grey sweater, the desert boots and Persol glasses, I pictured wandering like a low rent, Midwestern version of Anthony Bourdain, my iPhone blaring a Mumford & Sons soundtrack over my inner monologue, a semi-snarky but not too jaded collection of clipped observations playing to the audience in my head.
But it was raining a bit too hard to wander, so I jumped in my car and drove aimlessly until I made a left turn Read the rest of this entry »
