Yearly Archives: 2011

These hands also double as Ginzu Knives, absolutely free! A college friend of mine blew into town the other day (I won’t give him the satisfaction of naming him), and I noticed right away that something was different with him. He’d lost a ton of weight, he looked healthier, and when I chanced to see […]

Patron Saint of Pappies There’s a certain type of gay man for whom my friend Mark has coined the perfect name: the Pappy. You’ve all run into them, gay men of a certain age who are a little too rigid in their fastidious ways, often manifested in dress and movement but mostly in their firm […]

A friend of mine once commented that I should start a cooking blog. Is my need for procrastination so apparent? The amount of cooking I do does seem to be in inverse proportion to how much writing I’m getting done. That said, some tasty meals have been thrown down of late. I’ve fixated on this […]

My house is redolent with the odor of skunk. How it manages to permeate every room, with no windows or doors open, is one of nature’s lovely mysteries. Our (stupid, accursed) dog has been banished to the garage for the night. That heady mix of flatulence and burning tires, it’s like a noxious tonic for the soul. […]

All right, slowly coming back after a voiceless weekend… Friday night, my throat started closing off. Frightening. By Saturday it hurt to swallow, eat, or talk. It was like that slug-thing from “The Hidden” was pushing it’s way out of throat: Remember this? Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Nori? Netflix it.  Thank God it happened after my “Kung […]

Doug: I’ll explain to you how ‘compression’ works. Let me grab a piece of paper… James : Er, wait, is this going to be like you trying to explain what ‘going up a third’ means in music? Doug: Yes.  James: I need more pie.  I have finally set up my home studio, complete with baffler, […]

Spending the morning reading the tutorial on how to use a digital recording application I’ve just downloaded called “Audacity.” Exciting, eh? I’m setting up a home recording “studio” (AKA my study closet) so that I can record voiceover auditions from home, thus garnering me more chances to yell my brains out on all manner of […]

Tick. Tick. Tick. Minutes before Easter Sunday. I’ve placed the giant log of brioche dough rolled with cinnamon and sugar in the refrigerator, from where it will be taken out the next morning, sliced, left to rise up gloriously like our Savior, and be transubstantiated into pecan sticky buns. The pizza rusticas are cooling on […]

Sunday: it was a tiring, unspun day, clogged with snotty tissues rising like yeast on my son’s night stand, bowls of uneaten soup and cups of unsipped tea, rumpled sheets and the constant search for the inhaler to administer puffs of albuterol. A sleepless night. The day meted out in four-hour increments for medication. Finally, […]