Three Classic, Yet Lesser-Known Tracks — Five months ago today, I made one of the most important decisions of my entire life: I stopped drinking. Over the last decade, I eliminated all my other addictions one by one (and trust me, they were many, though I was what is called a “functioning addict”). …

Flash Fiction — The brassy clamoring of car horns creates a cacophony, pierced only by drivers shouting and a wailing alarm siren. Simon realizes the traffic will not budge. Amid all the noise, his body registers and isolates a deep, low vibration, and for a moment he feels inside a giant dynamo. The…

Summer Challenge: The Talking Heads’ “Nothing But Flowers.” — Of Music and Memory Songs, in and of themselves, have been known to evoke many emotional states, but there are perhaps none so powerful as when a particular song is steeped in our own personal histories — like a sonic dream fragment, some emerge from the mist of their own time as signifiers, to…

Open Letter Regarding my Absence as Reader and Writer — As some of you may have noticed, I have been “slacking off” on my Medium/Riff duties. Because I do not want this ebb to be misconstrued as a lack of interest on the behalf of all you beautiful souls who so generously give me your time, your minds and your…

Reinvention at 45 — Up until the middle of May, I was writing regularly on Medium across a series of publications as diverse as The Lark, StoryMaker, Illumination, The Riff and others; posts ranging from my own poetry, to flash fiction, creative non-fiction, album and song reviews; I can safely say it was an…

Teenage Musical Rebellion: N.W.A’s “She Swallowed It.” — Headnote: This essay originated as a direct response to Reuben Salsa’s own essay “You Suck. Suck It Hard. Go Down, Baby.” On the Weaponization of Music by Adolescent Boys There comes a time in teenage boys’ lives for developing their own identity. They embark on less than felicitous musical choices by distancing themselves as much as possible from…

“New Skin for the Old Ceremony”: What You Thought You Knew, You Didn’t — A few weeks ago, I dropped off the Medium writing map for various existential reasons, which would doubtless bore you all to tears, so consider yourselves respectfully spared! However, during this hiatus, when I was supposedly closed for stock-taking, I was delightfully “interrupted” by the now-holidaying Noah Levy regarding whether…

The Vatican urges Italian government to desist from anti- homophobia law. — Freedom to Love Whomever, Revoked It was a quiet Sunday night in Rome as three young men, Jean Pierre Moreno, his boyfriend and a friend waited for their train on a platform of the Valle Aurelia metro station, returning home from a birthday celebration. As most couples do in public sometimes, Jean Pierre and his…

A poem —