If I disappear one day, it won’t be that someone has killed me. Nor that I have killed myself. There will be no mystery. There will be no episode of Dateline or true crime podcast to binge. If I disappear it will be that I have reached my limit on…

NOTE: I wrote a mediocre version of this in my weekly newspaper humor column in 1997. I’ve updated the mediocrity for 2023 because fuck that newspaper. I was sick. Guh. Not just sick. The kind of sick where you say, “I’m sick. Guh.” The cocktail of cough syrup, Benadryl and…

“You’ll need to bring in your medical power of attorney document, just in case.” Not the words I was expecting to hear from the pre-op nurse just minutes after the neurosurgeon recommended a discectomy for my 17-year-old aching back. My brain went from “Oh shit! I have to have surgery!”…

If a story begins with “From my perspective as a Southern white man …” it’s probably not worth reading. …

The juxtaposition is my favorite literary device. Perhaps because it embodies me in many ways. Or perhaps it embodies how I perceive myself. The stark reality is I am a middle class, white male from a very rural part of a Southern state. …

Once upon a time, I was paid actual money to write a weekly newspaper column. It was for a small newspaper in my hometown. It was a humor column. For no reason than sheer nostalgia, I went back to read a few of my old tomes recently. …

Freshman English at Pikeville High School meant two things: William Shakespeare and Layne Tackett. The former, you would study. The latter would study you. Mr. Tackett was intimidating for such a small man. He was wiry, but in a mountain man, don’t-mess-with-me kind of way. His graying, dark beard hid either a smirk or a smile and there wasn’t much between the two. As one student read a passage, Mr. Tackett would wide-eye over…

The Ironic Reality of Being Distinguished My voice mail notification showed a new message. The text version of the recording my phone produces automatically after wouldn’t have won any awards at the annual transcription convention. It read, in part: “Good morning chasing. This is ran deed robbers. I called to…

It’s not normal human behavior to mace yourself. But you just don’t understand the extent to which I will go to fuck with Stewart. Stewart Theodore Davis, or as I call him, STD, is wiry thin with frozen turkey skin. His bulbous forehead protrudes from a dome with no chin…