Bite Me, Tony

Tales From the Bookcase: 10 Favorites Read in 2021 (Part 1) I'll try and keep this short since it's my list of the best books I read in 2021, and was meant to be posted by New Years Day. What with one thing and another that, obviously, did not happen so here they are, along with a recommendation on why I think you should spend your valuable time reading each one. In no particular order: 1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This noirish classic melodrama, set amongst the glitterati of 1920's suburban New York, takes place over a single summer in 1922, when several lives collide rather messily amidst a background of lavish parties, spectacular mansions, dirty deals and doomed romance. Jay Gatsby is the fabulously wealthy title character with a murky past, although the tale is told through the first-person narrative of next-door-neighbor, Nick Carraway, an idealistic young man-on-the-move who is cousins with Gatsby's beloved, Daisy Buchanan. The story was inspired ...

Dear god, the things that happen to our bodies as we move from mid-life to, well, shall we say, later mid-life. No matter how good a shape we're in (or think we're in), there's always some devious reminder--call it the i mp of the perverse (see Poe's short story), if you will--lying in wait to deliver a painful jolt of reality. During my seemingly endless convalescence from the self-inflicted misadventure of the broken rib, I have found myself reading more than my usual book a week, no small feat, given that the nasty spill seems also to have dislodged a retina, unhinged a cataract or else spawned some other catastrophe in my left eye. If you wear glasses, imagine someone smearing a vaseline-drenched finger across one lens and you'll get the general idea. I'd have been howling about this sooner but the broken rib was of sufficient torture that I figured my eyesight would clear up once the pain (and the blur of the pain meds) lifted.  But, no.  It looks like the...

  And just like that....I nearly killed my damn self, and completely missed the changing of the Old Guard (2021--good-fucking-bye and good-fucking-riddance) to the New (2022, not looking too good, so far). We'd gone to Tampa on Wednesday, the 29th of December, in order to spend the New Years holidays with C's cousin and her family. Immediately upon arrival, I deduced that it would be a good idea to play tag football with the cousin's 9 year old son, a 5'4", 135 lb. ox. of muscle and motion. Even given the noted Wells coordination (or lack thereof), it was an astonishingly brief interstice from the start of the game to me hitting the edge of the backyard patio at top speed, briefly becoming airborne, and then  taking a spectacular nosedive into the cold, hard embrace of solid concrete. My descent was dreamy slo-mo, like a playback on Monday Night Football; the crash-landing, on the other hand, was catastrophic real time, my outstretched hands failing to prevent the ...