memoir
The Night Jim Struck Out
Turns out even twenty-two years old, three thousand miles from home, drunk in the parking lot of a foreign motel I’m not that guy.
memoir
memoir
Copenhagen
I was a redneck kid with redneck friends and it’s hard to sneak a cigarette in High School but it’s easy to sneak a dip. Shop teacher didn’t even pretend not to notice. Smokeless tobacco ruled the high school bleachers. I started, like all St Tammany Parish kids do, with Skoal Bandits
essay
A Purpose
I was staring at that stack of journals, knowing I needed to write something for the first of the year and wondering if I could find some inspiration in Memaw’s words.
memoir
"He Who Doesn't Believe...
...doesn't receive."
essay
A Black Dog at Night
He makes a circuit counter clockwise around the perimeter of the yard, checking the tree where he saw a squirrel, the rock wall where he heard a chipmunk, and under the shed where he knows the rabbits live.
memoir
Fathers, Sons, Soldiers, and Poetry
We both hid a part of ourselves behind a soldier’s body armor and camo paint and when that didn’t work we retreated behind the smile of a beer drinking buddy.
memoir
El Paso
After thirty years how it all ended doesn’t matter. Those missed signals, my idiot roommate, Lorrie’s unrequited crush, a strange new soldier, and the United States Army don’t mean a fucking thing...
memoir
The Squirrel Hunters
It’s a song about a man facing heartbreak who retreats to the winter woods. It’s a song about healing heartbreak on a cold morning with a Browning Auto 5. It took me back to Bienville Parish. It took me back to the first weekend in October. It sounded like my father’s voice.
commentary
Thoughts and Prayers and Thank You For Your Service
...I pity them. I feel genuinely sorry for all of them with their yellow ribbon stickers and “would’ve served but” because I experienced something else during those dark days, something they will never experience for themselves.
memoir
Fear and the World's Greatest Turkey Sandwich
It was little better than prison food. Three slices of cold roast turkey in between two sliced of white bread, no condiments, just a Styrofoam cup of water to wash it down and lime Jello for dessert.
memoir
An Outlaw's Prayer
For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me, that the reason I didn’t have faith was because I was bad or broken. I don’t believe that anymore, but I still don’t understand. How is it everyone I love takes comfort in religion and I find none?
memoir
15 Miles in the Dark
It was on those long drives that I talked myself into asking out a girl for the first, second, and third times and where I dealt with the crushing defeat of rejection and the low grade, lingering pain of being “just friends.”