Saturday my girlfriend looked out the front window to see a police officer inspecting the hood of her car, like a biology student on a fieldtrip. But he was writing on a notepad that, regardless of his off-duty interests, looked an awful lot like it was full of blank parking tickets.
“But that’s impossible,” we said [...]

New taillights! Yes! I am the best, with my new, un-cracked rear indicators. Take that, Tercel! I will eventually fix all your broken parts, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me (beyond, of course, breaking at a faster rate than I can fix).
The rear lights (brake and signal) have been broken even [...]

I’m deep in the soup of competing high speed internet plans. There about seventeen different ways to do this, which is funny since there’s only one company to do it through: Comcast.
What ever happened to the free market? My options for HSI are simple; Comcast or Comcast. DSL isn’t available, so that leaves cable, [...]

Driving home in abnormally dense traffic yesterday, a thought occurred to me: this traffic is the work of the devil himself. No other force could connive such a fist-clenching, lung-clogging, ear-drumming inconvenience. No other force except, of course, The Minnesota State Fair.
It has been my privilege and my crucible to have lived within walking [...]

Part 2: Competition
I don’t know when the idea came up. I don’t know how. Perhaps it was whispered in the back of the room. Maybe it was written on an unusual fortune cookie. Wherever it came from, it was soon accepted as fact.
There was to be a Tex Mex Challenge. Anyone could compete. The goal: [...]

Sometimes the days are so short and so long, they feel like rubber bands; stretching and shrinking in the same direction.
Lately my days are like that, and it doesn’t make good fodder for the typewriter…eh, keyboard. I could write about a busy day at work in which I shifted the position of my posterior [...]

“Moon…river…wider than a mile…”
She was singing to me in slow, warm breaths. I could feel her lips brushing my ear, but I wanted her closer, so I pulled at her hips.
“I’m crossing you in style…someday…”
It was night, and we were dancing. The moon shone a thin, half-full light on the smooth cobblestone rocks of [...]

Well, I was going to keep this a secret as long as possible, knowing the huge public outcry it would cause, but I finally decided you had a right to know: I’m going to quit writing.
Yep. That’s right. Hear those loud booms? Those are the pillars of humanity crumbling. Well, I hope insurance covers [...]

It was evening. Cloudy, humid, and hot. I was sitting on the couch watching Law & Order, wondering how many dust mites my sticky skin was picking up, when I looked outside and saw a bright streak of golden orange light against my neighbor’s garage.
Then I heard thunder. And then I heard rain.
It was [...]

When I was a kid we lived in a student-housing complex near the Saint Paul campus of the University of Minnesota. It was a sprawling layout of town-homes, laid out more or less like a honeycomb. Each cell was made up of two or three long curving rows of town-homes, with a huge green lawn [...]