In the face of atrocity, those who claim the mantle of heroism mustn’t flinch from the difficult deals Star Wars villains have taken over the cruise ship I’m aboard, and they’ve started murdering passengers — even children. I start to prowl the ship, using the Force here and there. I find myself in a restaurant…Read More
Articles from January 2020
Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash
Photo by Florian van Duyn on Unsplash
The Knocking – Part I
The day the knocking started, we couldn’t have known what it would bring I don’t know what they are. The sane portion of my mind bays out to me the word “ghoul.” The ever-growing insanity inside me knows no word for them, however, and only whispers, somehow more loudly than the baying, “Come in.” I…Read More
Illustration by Kevin Mann.
Sharing the Wife
A BMW club meeting atop the mountain turns into a salacious scene This $24 cheeseburger displeases me. A fucking disgrace, really. Tepid disk of flavorless beef. Soggy brown sugar bacon. Gruyere cheese sourced from a basement, I think. The draft beer selection is rather pedestrian, though this place tried to rebrand itself as a gastropub.…Read More
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My Stardust Melody
We are all children of the universe — but can we go to Jupiter? Note: Dan Szczesny is an award-winning New Hampshire journalist, author, and speaker. His latest work, The White Mountain, along with all other things Dan can be found at his website here. For the last four years, Dan published daily “live essays,” such…Read More
Photo by Eddie Kopp on Unsplash
My Feral Man Child
Encounters with the wildness just beyond the edges — and within us all Around lunchtime my feral man child with his heavy, purposeful gait and caveman hair comes down the long roadside hill near my money job, returning upward from the supermarket with a light plastic bag of groceries though more often just a personal-size…Read More
Photo by Eduard Militaru on Unsplash
The Windows
There’s something of magic in that glass, and the windows stay with the house The windows are the best part of the house. Over the years the broken panes have been replaced with factory glass, but many are still original and the sunlight which passes through is simple and splendid. Blown and imperfect glass refracts…Read More
by JonXRainer
Milk, Milk, Lemonade
Or, Delirium at the Food Show, the Cheese Takes Over Pus pervades otherwise innocent dreams. The alarm rings poisonously in the gut. Nightmares, suspended in cheesecloth, chase twilight back over the hills, shrieking to save their master from the solar system’s police chief. I put some Chet Baker on Spotify and cook two eggs in…Read More
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Improvisation
You are a John Coltrane riff, suddenly exploding in my eyes Note: Dan Szczesny is an award-winning New Hampshire journalist, author, and speaker. His latest work, The White Mountain, along with all other things Dan can be found at his website here. For the last four years, Dan published daily “live essays,” such as this one,…Read More
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Take Joy
A sermon for Epiphany and the New Year delivered at Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church on January 5, 2020 Note: full text of the reading referenced in this sermon can be found here. I grew up in a religious home, but because we weren’t Catholic or Orthodox or any other denomination with close ties to Old World…Read More
Photo by Paul Gilmore on Unsplash
The Hat
Scenes from a hot afternoon while the car is being fixed His car was in a downtown shop for a couple of hours, so he went for a walk on a hot sunny day. He forgot his Myrtle Beach ballcap in the car, and unlike some men having accepted the reality of thinning hair, popped into a…Read More