Writing hasn’t been easy for me lately. In lieu of many significant life changes, including but not limited to divorce, back surgery, and the clustered deaths of friends and family, including my father, I’ve felt my need to write extinguished by the inkless dark vacuum of writer’

In the daylight, there wasn’t much that scared the kids in my quiet suburban neighborhood in the early 1980s. The most we feared were cooties from the opposite sex and earwigs, which were fabled among us kids to crawl into your ear and lay eggs in your brain like those ear worms