Whenever I encounter beauty I get a kind of a stabbing sensation, right in the gut where I’ll never recover. I can say this as confidently as possible, considering I have never been stabbed in the gut, except by beauty. I get stabbed like this all the time and it’s been going on all my […]
February 9, 2011
“This is very interesting,” I said, “but you haven’t told me yet why you keep climbing into the lion’s cage at the zoo. I also what to know why, when I first met you, you where talking Rasta talk, when I now see that you can speak perfectly good English.” “Cho, mon,” he said, reverting […]
February 3, 2011
Daniel continued to tell the story about the mad sea captain while we waited for medical to x-ray his arm. Telling a story is an effective anesthetic, so he did not groan about his arm nearly so much as he did at first and the others in the waiting room began to cock their ears […]
January 30, 2011
A remarkable thing happened as Daniel proceeded to tell me his story while we waited for medical to x-ray his arm. The longer he spoke, the more his Jamaican patois disappeared and was replaced by a measured British-influenced accent. It’s a good thing that it did. Otherwise, I never would have believed the story that […]
January 4, 2011
Image by J. Griffin Stewart via Flickr I spent New Years Eve with my father at the nursing home, waiting for the ball to drop in his room while he snored in his chair. I woke him up three times, saying; don’t you want to see the New Year in? “I’ve seen too many years […]
December 28, 2010
The very next day, Cheryl was back at the ED, suicidal, as she had been every day last week, taking Christmas off. “Nobody called,” she wept. “I spent Christmas alone.” “I called you on Christmas. You were happy. You were listening to the radio.” “That was all just a mask,” she said. Patients always say […]
Like his namesake, Scheherazade, Harry must keep telling stories or he'll get killed off. He's been going at it for more than two years now and there no end in sight. He might outlive his author, the author's author.
When he started, Harry was a suicidal suicide crisis counselor at a hospital emergency room. He tried to hang himself there. Divorced, obese, middle aged, living in a garden apartment with no garden, in a city with a rotten core, he thought his children didn’t want to have anything to do with him until he got a call from his daughter and left on a cross country road trip, abandoning his job, and ambivalently seeking restoration and redemption amid the scraps of long distance fatherhood.
After a few adventures on the road, he picked up his daughter and they made nice, but then his son got blown up in Afghanistan. He spread his boy's ashes on Pike's Peak and had a mountaintop experience on the way down.
Harry started a novel, Intersections, and, while writing at a coffee shop, he developed a crush on the Lisping Barista.
He heard that the coffee shop, the Epiphany Cafe, was about to close. The Lisping Barista would lose her job and move away. So, he cashed in his retirement money and bought the place.
That's where we are now.


April 18, 2011
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