I crossed the Atlantic on my way from Boston to London in a haze of drunken nervousness. God, I hate the plane. The invasive thoughts pour in, crashing and slamming down into the abyss. Every jolt of turbulence bouncing my soul around in my body. Just look at me up there. Up in there […]

Out on the street, I know how to hide. I move quick, flickering from pub to traffic signal under the yellow glow of streetlights and the muffled sounds of bass pulsating out of salt-caked Honda Civics and Ford Explorers. A blast of icy winter air whipping my face. Stress and anxiety is soldered into this […]

  Writing is work. Hell, reading is work. I appreciate your eyeballs. I like to lie to myself and say I love the labor involved, but watching a movie or going out to dinner sounds a lot better than parking my ass in front of the blue glow of a computer screen, knocking out a […]

Our classics and great traditions are a corpse that we resurrect every time we engage with them. If neglected, they remain a corpse—rotten, dead, forgotten—to our eternal detriment. The collected wisdom of the ages, disposed with like so much refuse. When engaged with properly, they are made new and live once more to illuminate the […]

I’ve been taking my health for granted. I’m well into my thirties now and I’ve yet to have been hospitalized for any illness. On the rare occasion I do fall ill, it’s most likely a quick flu that lingers around for a day or two. Even then, it’s an event that seems to happen around […]

Ah, the sun! The great giver and destroyer of life; oppressive and deadly, illuminating and vital. I like to keep out of its reach. My summer days are whittled away in the shade or in the comforting gloom of a darkened room with my face in a book, anticipating the return of the cold somewhere […]

We like to ignore our problems. Glitches go on overlooked. There is disorder and chaos everywhere, right down to the core of our being. Something needs to be terminated—a bad habit, a relationship, a job, a friendship. We have problems like you wouldn’t believe. It’s an unpleasant task. There will be tears, so we distract […]

The Mass is no light listening. It’s widely considered the crowning achievement of Western Music and one of the greatest works of art ever accomplished. It’s older than the United States—though it wasn’t performed in its entirety until 1859, over a hundred years after its completion.

Right around my early twenties I began to get a bit overwhelmed with the feeling that I didn’t know anything. I was haunted by the urge to grow as a person, especially intellectually. I began to load up on literature, physical exercise and classical music. I had always felt a deep attraction to classical music and sadly, it’s not […]