Every few months, the BBC releases a new installment of Top of the Pops: The Story of…, spotlighting a specific year through lens of the venerable pop music program. The format is strictly documentary-lite, generally apolitical, and typically focuses upon whoever accepts their invitation to provide commentary. (Think VH-1’s decade-themed specials from the Aughts — […]

It had been a typical Monday thus far. I’d finished sorting out the previous weekend’s data dump and took care of any outstanding request tickets. All that remained was to ride out the rest of my shift before making the long drive back to Woburn. Then my cell started buzzing, and its caller ID said […]

The man responsible for shaping me into the person I am, for good and ill, was found dead in his apartment yesterday. I hadn’t spoken with him in about a month. Despite a lot of talk about being a better person, he’d slipped into his manipulative ways. I called him out on it, after which […]

What was supposed to be a short holiday hiatus turned out to be longer than anticipated due to some family stuff. Maura’s mom passed away and my dad was hospitalized for numerous health issues including a minor stroke. I considered taking this as a sign that the chapter of my life which this site played […]

I have a lot of feelings about the protracted demise of Sears. It’s sad to watch an icon implode, especially one that occupied such a prominent place in both cultural sphere and my formative years. There’s been a odd symmetry to witnessing my grandmother’s death and the shuttering of the former retail titan in space […]

Greetings, bats and ghouls and other creatures of night! Today is the first of October, which means the a month-long festival of all things spooky and groovy. This announcement would’ve been posted earlier the day, but I was visiting a graveyard…for the funeral of a member of my extended family, taken from us far too […]

Looking back, you wonder if any of it was real. Of course it was. You can find ample physical evidence in any thrift store or the few sad remnants you’d elected to hold on to all this time. There’s a part of you that whispers how these were your best years — a halcyon daze […]

I have been spending my Friday afternoons helping to clear out my Nana’s house. There’s very little of my grandparents’ possessions I bothered to lay claim to in the “who wants this” scrum — an antique writing desk, a table my father’s uncle made as a wedding gift for my parents, a pair of porcelain […]

Yesterday’s post got me to thinking about my grandmother’s duplex, particularly the side where my family resided for not quite half a decade. There are a lot of not great memories associated with it. It’s where our domestic dysfunctions entered the final downward spiral culminating in my mother’s death. It’s also where I struggled through […]

Sometime during the 1996 primary season, I decided to pay a visit to Excalibur Hobbies in Malden Center. The shop had been my go-to place for all things role-playing during high school and my early college years, but fell by the wayside after my undergrad wanderings settled into the Allston-Cambridge-Somerville axis (a.k.a. the Used Vinyl […]