Walk It Off

Walk It Off was recently included in Tulip Tree Publishing’s anthology; Stories That Need to be Told 2022.

This is a tale about a lifetime of missteps, mishaps, and misbehavior, and the cure for the broken bones that resulted.

My parents raised four boys, two girls, three dogs, two cats, six gerbils, a turtle and a bat. Ours was a household filled with love, companionship and mortal danger. If we survived the dog bites, snakebites and kid bites, we still had to contend with smallpox, measles, and mumps – all of which could kill you or seriously hamper your social life. By necessity my mother was adept at the mending of cuts, burns, bee stings, botulism, plague and constipation.

Smooth As Silk

Since this platform is called WineSnark, I should point out that, although this tale never actually mentions wine, I did drink several bottles while I was writing it. And the story begins with the protagonist suffering from a hangover that would probably kill a Kodiak bear so I think that qualifies as wine-blogworthy.

Smooth as Silk was recently included in Tulip Tree Publishing’s anthology; Stories That Need to be Told 2021 and received the book’s Merit Award for Humor.

With a year of high school yet to complete, I looked west from the interstate entrance ramp, stuck out my thumb and turned my back on New Jersey. Three days later I woke up in a Racine, Wisconsin hospital. My throat was raw from a stomach pump, my back ached from the impact of a hundred cars plowing into one another, and my head throbbed from the impact of several gallons of Milwaukee beer and a bottle of cheap scotch. I was happy to wake up alive but unfortunately a hundred thousand brain cells had perished during the night.

It was this chain of events that brought me to live with my older brother Doug and paved the way for the tremendous bond that was to develop over the next year. Yes, this is the story about the love between me and my first car.

WineSnark Gets Physical.

New Book Features WineSnark Memoir

I’m holding a book in my hands and I love the feel of it. My friend Robin Robinson, author of The Complete Whiskey Course: A Comprehensive Tasting School in Ten Classes¹ explained, “There’s something special about the tactile pleasure of holding your thoughts in your hands.”  Conscious ideas and experiences suddenly have paper and ink to smell, an evocative cover to see, and rustling pages to hear. But it’s the weight in my hands that makes me realize that when it comes to the five senses, nothing gets my heart thumping like the sense of touch. I can’t help myself, I’m a tactile kind of guy (no, no – not tactful – you regular readers know me better than that). What I mean is that when it comes to pure joy, no other sense has been more universally incorporated into my experiences than the sense of touch.

I Teach Therefore I Am! (Regrettably I Am In New Jersey)

Mark Twain reportedly once quipped, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” For regular readers of WineSnark I’d like to say that despite my long absence from these pages I am not dead, I’m just living in New Jersey.

And when the Grim Reaper finally does come calling , I hope to go out in a trance-like stupor, just like my readers.

Not long ago I told my wife that when my time finally does come, I want to go out like Willard Motley who famously said, “Die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.”

She said, “Too late.”

A Magical Christmas Revisited

“The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there …”  

I’ve had my ups and downs this past year. First, there was the Lexus that sent me up in the air, and then there was a misstep that sent me down the stairs. That probably explains why I wasn’t buying into the whole “Jolly ol’ St. Nick” routine when the holidays arrived.

Come December I was a man complacently in touch with his inner Scrooge but then – in keeping with the destiny of Dicken’s transformative curmudgeon – something magical happened and I suddenly found that holly-jolly bounce back in my step. What unexpectedly had me caroling, caroling, caroling was a weird (but true) encounter with the Christmas spirit – and I’m not talking about the eggnog.