Before I go any farther down this particularly dangerous rabbit hole, please understand that I am a huge Gleek. First among my loves on Glee is Miss Quinn Fabray, portrayed by the ever beautiful Dianna Agron. That being said, I’m a writer, acutely aware of storycraft and always on the lookout for those times when writers…
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Dear Howler Monkey Chorus: The current national debt, totaling some $15.9 trillion dollars, is easy to understand. One third of it, $5.4 trillion, existed prior to 2000. That means, in 11 years, the debt has gone up about $1 trillion a year. Now, of that $11 trillion, fully half of that money can be attributed…
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Or: Reality Check: 101 Let’s get real, people. Today marks the first day of the of Joe Paterno’s post-college football life. Think about how much this man’s life has changed in the past few weeks. For it wasn’t too long ago that JoePa, as he is known to Lions fans the world over, was a…
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Here’s a question: what would it take to get you to read a five or six paragraph short story every day? The stories wouldn’t be interconnected. They would have only occasionally reoccurring characters and they would appear in your inbox each morning. Once they were distributed via email, they would be archived. I’ve been toying…
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Papaw’s study is perhaps the most vivid of my childhood memories. Everything about that room — the heavy oak desk, the southeastern window, every surface piled high with papers — has a mystical pull upon the deepest recesses of my mind that walking through Office Depot will frequently turn into a trip back in time. A…
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Or: Why people ignore celebrities, even when they’re right Dear Mr. Morgan, As a huge fan of NBC‘s 30Rock, I’ve grown accustomed to your on-screen persona, Tracy Jordan, spewing any amount of stupidity. So it really came as no surprise to me when I read on TMZ.com that you had taken to the stage at…
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Or: Demythologizing the Politics of the Gulf Oil Spill It seems like years ago that I was standing on the beach in Grand Isle, Louisiana, with a 4th generation shrimper who was watching wave after wave of oil-contaminated water lap onto the shore. In that moment, this nameless man was no longer a shrimper. He…
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NOTE: I’ve often heard or read of writers describing the vivid dreams that led them to write their great novels. Sadly, only twice have such dreams happened to me. The second occurred two nights ago. I’m just now writing about it. Enjoy. -md There was a great debate raging in that space that exists…
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Or: I’m going to kill myself getting this done in time. I do this to myself every year. March is a month I should spend celebrating my birthday. (I turn thirty-four at the end of the month.) I should be recovering from the onslaught of allergies that happens every year in late February. I could…
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(What Would Ayn Do?) I’ve always heard people say negative things about Ayn Rand, the 20th Century writer and philosopher and, quite arguably, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century America. Usually, the comments seem benign to the average listener. But to someone who grew up arguing about how to “properly parse…
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