I remember the first time I saw a dead body. Two of my friends were killed by a drunk driver and I had to identify them. It was a head on collision where both vehicles were going around seventy miles per hour. It took a long time of staring at their mangled corpses to...

    For years I thought the idea of saying I had PTSD was bad. I viewed it as a term of weakness. I didn’t live through Vietnam so what I saw and went through wasn’t bad enough to warrant something so horrible. Sounds silly, but it was what I thought and...

I hit a deer the other day. My son walked out to the driveway to survey the damage. He looked at the deer fur and deer poop splattered across the broken grill of my SUV. Then he sat down in the driveway and started crying. “Dadda, I love deers and ladybugs. I’m so sad...

The dead miss us. I know. My best friend comes to say hi more often than he should. I don’t know how it works, or if it’s really him, but he’s there. I think. His name is Angel. Well, Angel Cruz Lee. People called him Cruz. He really wasn’t much of an angel, but he’s...

Anton Chekhov eloquently stated years ago a simple fact with respect to story construction.  If you have a gun leaning against the wall during the first act of a play, you better use it in the second act.  Otherwise, get rid of the gun.  This is an important ideal, it...