(Written on May 1, 2023) I’m sitting at my desk watching the rain come down outside my window. My cats are sprawled on their “desk bed” enjoying the antics of wet squirrels. It’s well into springtime, which inspires thoughts of the inevitability of change and the renewal that follows it. …

Why It’s So Hard to Move On After a Breakup When someone dies most people understand the well-known process one goes through. It has to do with the 5 stages of grief and the rewiring of the neural mapping in your brain. …

Cloaked in slumberous youth one sleepy day, As heat from the pavement rises high, A vision of love seen through rose-colored glass She thought, “With this rapture can I fly.” She traveled to a distant place, A castle in the sun-baked sky, So began her fall from Grace; Unbeknownst was…

You and I, and likely much of the rest of the world, spend an inordinate amount of time avoiding emotional intimacy because it scares the sh*t out of us. — We tease each other, we disappear into our computers and cell phone screens, we escalate conflicts, we retreat into silence, we numb ourselves with T.V., and an infinite number of other ways to avoid the pain we have experienced in past relationships going all the way back to childhood.

Most of us have experienced falling in love. We meet. The stars align. DJ Universe plays all the right songs on the radio. The chemistry is sweetly perfect and we decide to pursue the dopamine rush, believing that this time it will be different. Falling in love is like falling backward through space into, hopefully, the waiting arms…

Yesterday I was feeling adventurous, so I decided to take another whirl at potty training my son Maxx. He wasn’t ready before but I thought, what the hell… try, try again. I had just purchased the latest in portable pooping technology and was eager to give it a test run…

We’ve all been down the road of love, though some have made more trips than others. If you’re still on your original trip you gotta tell me your secret. I thought I’d get a bit vulnerable and share a story in an effort to embrace resiliency. The kind of love I’ve been seeking is the kind that I hope will eventually mature into what I call “Stirring the Oatmeal Love.” That’s when, after the frenetic energy of new love has worn away and I’ve been with my love long enough to grow old (or in my case, older) it might look something like this: I’m standing at the stove in my ratty, old bathrobe stirring the morning oatmeal and my sweetie looks at me from over the Sunday newspaper and says, “Damn baby, you still make me hot” to which I reply in my best Marilyn Monroe sultry, breathy voice, “I’m feeling kinda hot right now.” He would then look at me and chuckle as he pointed out the reason why I was feeling hot was because one of my boobs had sagged into the pot of oatmeal… thus explaining the heat I was feeling.

It was an ordinary, humdrum kind of day. The sun was shining, the air was heavy with humidity and nothing of great import was happening. Then I heard it… an enchanting, hypnotic sound muted by the thick, summer air. It drifted along on an errant breeze and I followed it…

This is a story about family. It’s a story about entitlement and crossed boundaries. It’s a story about… well, Mexican Chicken Coffee. I grew up in a large family — one brother, three sisters, a menagerie of animals, and two very dysfunctional parents. …