THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

  In the summer of 2013, when I packed away the last stuff I was ever going to take from my first-ever house on Resort Pike Rd. outside of Petoskey -- a small place twelve minutes from the College, purchased at a slightly inflated price from two work colleagues and ultimately sold for far less -- I had a moment’s sorrow where I cried in the guest room / music room, shedding tears by myself for a moment that seemed longer than it was, thinking about promises made and promises broken while an uncertain but exciting future lay ahead.  I'd left plenty of apartments in the past without a second glance, but this was my first goodbye to a house, and it was tougher than I expected. But the transition away from the Perch Lake house that I called home for almost exactly seven years, pictured above in the bottom center? My first house as a married dude with a wife and two little doggos, my first house on a body of sparkling clear water, my most expensive purchase to date? Leaving that ho...

In January of 1984, a thirteen-year-old boy took the SAT’s in a large and uncomfortable room surrounded by hundreds of other kids and scored a 920 combined. That score was good enough for me to qualify to attend a three-week summer academic program (a.k.a. "nerd camp") at Alma College from 8 July to 27 July called the Midwest Talent Search. Given the choice between a mathematics or English program, I chose English.  I chose English largely because of a middle school teacher named Mrs. Brown, who taught a 7th + 8th grade English Enrichment class of which I was a student. In the two years that I was in English Enrichment, my writing simply wasn’t consistently good enough for Mrs. Brown, and I got the worst grades of my middle school career. At the time, my grandfather was the assistant principal and athletic director, so perhaps I suffered for the sins of the (grand)father, as not everyone warmed to the unyielding countenance of Earl Haight. Or perhaps it was the simple fact th...

A lot of my "...when I was a kid..." memories are of deprivation. They shouldn't be, of course -- for example, I had two parents who, while they weren't together, loved and supported me -- but for a time in preadolescence, I lived in a rural area outside of a small town, with a couple of radio stations and a couple of VHF TV stations to periodically give me transmissions of mainstream culture. And I wanted more, and I told myself to go out and get more, within my parameters of general laziness and sloth. As I got older, with the disposable income that comes with working jobs and being "parsimonious" (a.k.a. "cheap as fuck"), I was able to uphold that promise to myself after a fashion. I wanted more comic books to read and more movies to watch and more music to listen to, and I was able to do all three. Were the adult me able to time travel to that shitty dirt road outside of Roscommon and pop out of my underinsulated bedroom closet to show my 10-ye...

It's been just under fifteen years since I did my first three-pack of Netflix DVD rentals -- The Brown Bunny (2004), La Petite Lili (2003), and The Corporation (2003) -- and with a total of 481 titles watched, paired with the resigned understanding that I will never have the time to watch the 388 titles currently in my queue, I've come to the decision that my DVD plan at Netflix will end tomorrow. As a film lover from a rural area, Netflix in the early 00's was a godsend, and I'm sure in many ways I was their ideal customer, even if I did dial back from the 3-at-a-time plan pretty quickly. But I will say that while some of the titles I rented were watched as soon as I got home from the post office, others sat at my house for months, earning Netflix a tidy profit on my recalcitrance and sloth. But now that I've moved to a new house, and after unpacking box after box of physical media -- some watched or played or read, some not -- it's clear that some thin...

When I was younger, it seemed that my mind wandered with greater volume and velocity. As I approach 50, I’m mostly tired and task-oriented-ish, but sometimes, the mental journeys of old return. Early this morning, I thought about money, and after I read about John Lewis passing away — John Lewis, a man more deserving of a statue or a naval base named after him than any white Confederate traitor who ever lived — I thought some more. First, eliminate the penny and the dollar bill. Stop making them entirely. For the former, round all prices up or down to the nearest nickel and go from there. And for the latter, replace dollar bills with a greater utilization of dollar coins. And to spark this new monetary policy, mint new dollar coins with the faces of important African-American figures like Harriet Tubman and John Lewis and Scott Joplin and George Washington Carver (pictured below). I mean, I know I would like money with this dude staring back at me: With the new faces in circ...

This morning, an implosion finished the demolition of the Palace of Auburn Hills, which had served as the home for the Detroit Pistons from 1988 to 2017, where they were NBA Champions in 1989, 1990, and 2004. The 23,000-seat venue, which had a groundbreaking in June 1986, officially opened in August 1988. The Palace also hosted a wide array of concerts over three decades, starting with Sting on 13 August 1988, and ending with Detroit's own Bob Seger on 23 September 2017. I can't remember everything I ever saw at the Palace of Auburn Hills, but I do know that I went there for entertainment for half my life -- my first concert there was in 1992, and my last concert there was in 2017 -- and while it wasn't exactly an acoustical marvel, I had some great times in that place. Here are some of the highlights in my life at the Palace: The Cure wsg The Cranes [19 July 1992] The first time I ever saw The Cure, on their tour for the Wish album (a.k.a. the end of their Imperial...

When I was a kid, I was captivated by the field of acting, but especially the voice actors in animation. Don Smart as Tennessee Tuxedo, June Foray as Rocky, Casey Kasem as both Shaggy AND Robin...I tried imitating them all as a kid, with little to no success. But my absolute hero was Mel Blanc, the Warner Bros. staple who could seemingly do anything with his voice, even imitate his own imitations: Of the many failures in my life, the fact that I have neither the talent nor drive to be a paid voice actor stings the most, because I'm constantly attempting to do voices, to the consternation of my friends and family and students and passers-by, and I can delude myself into thinking I'm not horrible at a few of them. Like many kids, I briefly did acting in high school in a Theater class, where the failed voice actor temporarily became the failed actor. In my two years in Theater, at least the gamut of failure was wide (from what I can remember), as I played Sherlock Holmes, F...