2am Thoughts: The Legend of Scattin’ Sam

Laying awake at 2am in the dark, my mind drifted to thoughts of the upcoming Spring holidays, Easter and Passover. Both involve a visitation by a mystical entity: the Easter Bunny and the Angel of Death. One brings delightful baskets of candy to good little boys and girls. The other brings, well, death -- unless you've taken the precaution of smearing some lamb's blood over ...

The Mind Forgets, But the Body Remembers

I got up to pee, squinting my eyes at the clock to see what time it was. It was 3am on September 3rd, 2020. Then it hit me. Shit. It was now officially 11 years since my father had passed. It was 11 years since I went to sleep after my last phone conversation with him the night before -- September 2nd, 2009 -- hearing fear in his voice ...

2am Thoughts: Keep Pa Beautiful?

When you have insomnia, your mind starts to race and you think back on a lot of things. I guess it's the adult equivalent of trying to tell yourself a bedtime story. Staring at the ceiling last night, I started remembering (for all you young whippersnappers out there) that there was a time when state abbreviations weren’t standardized. There were no neat, clean, two-capital-letter abbreviations. ...