About a month ago, right around Earth Day (that comes into play very quickly), I got the song “Throwing Stones” by the Grateful Dead stuck in my ear. You can listen to it here. Even though it was written in the 1980’s it still has in its DNA the hippie ethos so often aligned with… Continue reading May 23, 2023

My first bartending job was at a Pizzeria Uno’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, directly behind the Museum of Natural History. My apartment at that time was on the Lower East Side, sitting in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. This necessitated taking two different subways to get home. Usually, this wasn’t too… Continue reading May 9, 2023

Before this past weekend, the “worst” road trip I took was a few decades ago, when I drove from Hartford, CT to Raleigh, NC for the weekend. I say “worst” not because of how it turned out, or the level of fun we had, but by ratio of travel time vs. fun time. And when… Continue reading May 2, 2023

Good and bad are probably the two worst words when it comes to describing something. Basically, they are the shortest of shorthand, as so many other adjectives fall under one or the other, yet all of those almost ask for further explanation. If you tell me something was great or inspiring or amazing, I’m probably… Continue reading Apil 28, 2023

Ahmad Jamal passed away over the weekend. I don’t expect most people to know his name. I certainly didn’t. He was a jazz pianist, aged 92, and what I know about jazz now is maybe a tenth of what I knew 30 years ago when I was listening to it with a lot more frequency,… Continue reading April 18, 2023

I had a tough day that caught me off guard. Some of it wasn’t unexpected. spent the morning dealing with a “compromised” (that’s what they call it) debit card, so I went and deposited enough to cover the fraudulent loss in the meantime. The problem is it left me all day trying to fill my… Continue reading December 16, 2022

I had a pretty amazing dream last night. I’m lucky enough that I tend to remember most of my dreams, and they tend to be rather vivid. This particular dream was about writing and producing a play that was about writing and producing a play. The entire dream took place in the theater where it… Continue reading December 14, 2022

When I ran Tisane, I had the chance to hire this kid Derrick. (Forgive me if my spelling is wrong; it’s been a long time.) He was fantastic. He was full of life, period. Not just energy or vim or whatever word you want; he was so engaging that, even though he had no experience… Continue reading November 6. 2022

I did something brave and crazy today: I went to the grocery store without eating. I even doubled down and went without a list. The most shocking part is that both of those choices were by design. Like I mentioned a few weeks ago when I posted about giving my notice, grocery shopping hasn’t been… Continue reading April 5, 2022

Among everything else that scrambles my eggs, I had this subconscious expectation that when things finally get back to normal, they would be, you know, normal. Granted, living in Florida means we already exist at some inane level of abnormal on a normal basis, and we never got as unnormal as the rest of the… Continue reading August 2, 2021