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As The World Turns
It was 4:00 am and I was tucked in, when the ceiling hit the floor and the room started to spin. YOW! I shot up as if a puny, mortal protest could bring the cyclone of a spiraling bedroom back down to...
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To Iran, with Love
I don’t know if you’ve seen Ben Affleck’s Oscar-baiting Argo or Showtime’s once-great Homeland, but while well-crafted, their largely cardboard depictions of Iranian people as fanatical, bloodthirsty,...
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Shine the Light
I’m out of the closet. Thanks to interweb fairy Jennie Saia at Tip of My Tongue for nominating Burns the Fire for a sunshiney award, advising me to nominate ten blogs I like and write ten, gulp, facts...
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Lost
I was in my head, my hood, my music, when a honking car blasted me back to the real world. I looked up to see an old woman standing on top of a manhole, in the middle of the icy street. Her lips were...
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All You Can Eat
I can’t look. A gang of black vultures are circling the manicured street I’m on, and I know they’re not here for the view. I can’t look, but my eyes do. They race to find the crush of splattered guts...
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez Saved My Life
The man, outside my own, who I have long fantasized about being stranded with on a deserted island, is dead. It wasn’t for the sex. I chose him because I couldn’t imagine a more ardent thinker,...
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How to stop smoking and do something else with your hands
I drop to my knees, ejaculating on the planks of my fortune, and exhale. I am breathing again, alive, electrified roots singing, man, singing, man, sweet angel of merciless shock, singing, this is...
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We Are Alive
There’s a mad woman in the café where I write who looks like Sarah Silverman with a bitchin tan and she’s yelling, swearing, tweeting, shooting espresso and vaping up a shit-storm as the Germans wipe...
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All About My Mother
I love my mother because, no matter the challenge, she loves life. I love my mother because she cooked gorgeous meals for our family every day, for years. I’d yell, Ma, what’s for supper? and bitch,...
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Between the Lines (and some writing tips)
My husband drags me out of the rapture of a NY finger lake in a summer storm, my love, it’s time. Briny tears, freshwater and I shower the front seat and we speed off on the highway home, gushing...
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Girls I Love
I don’t have children, but omg, I love my girls. Deep sea-creatures in the ocean of my heart, daughters from another world. I never wanted to have kids. The truth didn’t make me feel like a freak of...
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Love & Squalor in the Middle East
As the trauma in Israel/Palestine rages on, I try to keep my focus on growing peace between people, far from politics, wherever I see the light. Meet my friend Tali. Her life story is more stunning...
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Love & Squalor in the Middle East, 2
A shy Bedouin boy was stabbed to death in the Negev desert of Israel/Palestine. At night, in front of the fire he built, by the stranger he invited to share his food and tea. His name was Awwad Amrana,...
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My Uncle was Gay and I Want to Tell the World
My late, great Uncle Bruce was otherwise known as a fart-knocker, rump-ranger, poofter, fairy and shit-packing fag. It hurts to write those words, but that’s how a lot of people saw homosexual men, and...
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I Never Told
It was New Year’s Eve, 1986, at the tarted-up Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. I slipped inside a glittering ballroom; bushy-browed, sensitive, head-to-toe in black, searching for a thoughtful...
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Home, Sweet Home
I fell hard for Sgniezska and Eddy, two years ago, when our eyes locked on the street. I followed them home, tail wagging, to meet Eddy’s ace wife Junya, and down glass-after-glass of tea. Like a...
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Free Hugs
When the short, old, white guy in a blue jacket drops by the café where I write, like clockwork, a couple of beefy regulars shout, jumping out of their seats, and one-by-one, heave their hulking bodies...
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Deer People
Our car was skidding down a icy road in the Catskill mountains, on the last day of the year, when my husband jammed on the brakes and hissed. Look. Staring at us from the tangled woods was a massive...
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A Writer is Born.
It all came together when I learned how to spell. My grandparents were deaf-mute and we couldn’t talk until I cracked the alphabet and fast. I had a lot to tell them. The first word I formed with my...
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I Love You
I threw a football at a guy I had just met, at a freestyle picnic in the middle of a sun-swept field. I was savage, that ball freaking soared, and he ran after it backwards, laughing, shouting, arms...
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