This is the first in a series of descriptive essays I mean to undertake, not for the purpose of storytelling per se, or even necessarily being of interest to anyone other than myself and the siblings and close friends with whom I shared my upbringing. Rather, I am doing this as a way to remind myself of some formative aspects of my childhood, against the day when I become doddering and need an occasional reminder of things past. This first piece is about the house in which I grew up in Brunswick, Maine.

Oh, Lord, allow me to begin this potentially awkward conversation by directly and succinctly addressing the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. No, I do not believe in you. I do not believe you exist in any real corporeal sense (though I am prepared to concede acceptance of the concept of you). What I believe is that you are the fabrication (many different ones actually) of people desperately searching for answers that will enable them to make sense of a world they do not fully understand.

Officially it appeared on the curriculum as Industrial Arts, but it was known colloquially as simply Shop.  Whichever moniker you prefer, it was, during my adolescence, a rite of passage for teenage boys attending pretty much any public school system in the U.S. It was book-ended, at least in the sixties and seventies, by Home Economics, the analogous gender-role-reinforcing “academic” requirement for junior high girls.

In my dream[1] I run aimless and panting up and down the neutrallypainted, cinderblock-lined corridors of Brunswick High School, trying desperately to recall which of the countless thousands of lockers stretching before me is, in fact, my locker, and, having eventually located it after much fretting and fuming, struggling with even greater desperation to recall the specific left/right/left combination that will open it.

~ Transgenic Technology and the Foods We Eat ~ Humans eat food to survive. Most, if they’re fortunate, do it multiple times each day. And if we go very long without doing it, our bodies have limitless creative ways of making their displeasure known. But we also eat for pleasure—pleasure derived from taste and texture, from culture and tradition, and, for some, from the very process of creating food in the first place.

Morte nihil melius[1] Anonymous Introduction I know what you’re thinking, sitting there, furtively skimming this introduction, hoping no one sees you holding the manuscript. Why on earth would I read this? Who, for that matter, would even publish such a thing? Pessimism? Dear God, things are so bleak and heinous these days; what the world needs is optimism, damn it.

Growing up in Maine, it is reasonably assumed that my halcyon youth was filled with an unending orgy of skiing, camping, fishing, hunting, and all the other rustic backwood sorts of recreation that out-of-staters generally associate with the place. The bitter truth of the matter is that I never—not even once—participated in any of these activities until I was fully grown and had moved away to other places.[1]

I never doubted for a moment that this day would come. At some point in nearly every introductory conversation I have, the topic of children comes up. Do I have any? None, huh? Why is that, exactly? Then, sensing discomfort, awkwardness, we tacitly agree to move on to some different, safer topic of conversation. It’s at these moments that I frequently feel compelled to retort with something like, so, why did you decide to have kids?

Or Why Skiing is an Especially Apt Metaphor for Life Itself What do you get when you combine the annoyance factor of golf, the vast expense of scuba, and the bodily risk of skydiving? That’s right—skiing, a pastime whose origins are lost to antiquity, but which, in all likelihood, involved some Swiss or Austrian misanthrope—let’s agree to call him Gunther—living high on a mountain, who awakens one day to discover he is snowed in by a couple of feet of fresh powder from the previous night’s storm, and on the very day he had meant to go into the village at the base of the mountain for his semi-annual consignment of groceries.

Americans are positively infatuated with scoring in sports. I don’t mean scoring in the sense of keeping score, though goodness knows there exist more than a few hard-core fans who, not content to simply sit and watch a game, will, instead, labor over every pitch, hit, throw, and error that occurs, writing each down in arcane hieroglyphics on score-sheets, for what possible use afterward one is hard-pressed to imagine. I’m talking here, though, about our national obsession with seeing the score of each sporting contest rise to as high a level as possible.

~ Reflections on Just How Badly the Game of Golf can be Played ~ I have wanted to write about my views on the game of golf for quite a long time, but always resisted for one reason or another, not least because so many others more talented than me have made such a splendid job of it[1], leading me to conclude there was little I could add to the dialog.

Introduction The following observations are presented in no particular order, save for that in which they occurred to me. Which is to say that no one item is any more or less important than another, unless of course there is a specific safety issue being discussed, in which case I will make that plain, and expound as necessary. The only preemptive statements I will make by way of establishing credibility in the home repair field are to observe that I own a formidable collection of tools, both manual and powered, and yet I still possess all of my appendages, digits, and assorted extremities, which is more than I can say for my seventh-grade shop teacher.

Following is the complete unedited transcript of an extended interview conducted by Rolling Stone Feature Editor Marvin Foxtrap with Detroit Lions punter/place kicker Ryan Mitchell, following his team’s 45-6 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, during which game Mitchell missed 3 field goals, made 2, and punted an NFC single-game record 18 times, of which 3 were blocked, averaging 26 yards per punt. MF: Ryan, I want to spend a bit of time talking about tonight’s game, but before we get into that I’d like to hear your overall take on the job.

We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction. Denise Levertov Let me begin by stating, for the record, that I was more than a little hacked off when I heard about David Foster Wallace hanging himself a few years back. Just to be clear, this initial reaction wasn’t a sad or mournful thing; I was genuinely pissed: at him, his doctors, his family, anyone who could plausibly be blamed for his abject failure to successfully handle a life replete with talent, fame, and money, all things so many long for and so few actually possess[1].

When a complete stranger voluntarily spends enormous amounts of time and energy working to convince you to spend money on something you neither need nor want, that’s marketing. It is the very essence of capitalism, as vital to the free flow of wealth (from you to them) as the invention of cash[1] itself. And no matter how you feel about marketing—supportive, jaded, or ambivalent—it is absolutely critical that you understand how it works, because whether you acknowledge it or not, it is taking place all around you, every minute of every day.

Being the good industrious New England boy that I was, raised in the Puritan tradition of all-work-and-no-play-makes-one-a-Mainer, I began work—actual compensated work—at the age of eight. That would have made it 1965 or thereabouts, a couple of years after the tragic events of Dallas, and still in the early stages of what President Johnson was rapturously referring to as his New Society, a utopian age in which no one would want for anything nor be asked to do much to get it.

There is no such thing, nor should there be, as American “exceptionalism,” i.e. we are no better than anyone else on earth in any way, shape or fashion. And while we have a system of government that works reasonably well for us, that does not mean that it is “the right” system or that we should have as our mission imposing that system on others, particularly if they demonstrably do not want it. It is extraordinarily hypocritical to espouse democracy but to then fail to accept the wishes of those who exercise that privilege, simply because we don’t like who they elected.

There would seem to be something inherent, perhaps even genetic, about the need to face in the direction in which one is traveling, i.e. forward. Some of us have occasion, once in a great while, to travel while facing in another direction, and having done it a bit myself, I find it not only unsatisfying, but actually borderline unnerving, in that same hard-to-explain-to-someone-else-without-sounding-like-a-lunatic way that walking up or down a broken escalator is unnerving.

I cannot say what put me of a mind to delve into this particular topic, fraught as it is with emotion and history. Suffice it to say that the subject matter has troubled me for ages and I feel the need to get something down on paper, if only to concentrate my thoughts and bring a bit more focus to how I feel about it. I accept as well that precisely the opposite may be the result and that I may come away even more hazy and uncertain than when I began—a risk I am prepared to take.