The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

I kinda suck at putting together Halloween costumes and, looking back, I think I always have. At the risk of sounding like I'm shifting the blame, I think it was a family thing; my sister sucks at it too (If she reads this, I look forward to the torrent of expletive-filled texts). Looking back, they were pretty run-of-the-mill costumes from my sister dressed in the obligatory pumpkin costume to me dressed as a skeleton which is to say me wearing a skeleton combo consisting a black shirt, pants, and gloves with bones overlaid on the fabric; I wore this costume really up until early elementary school. Never really wore any costumes with masks growing up. I wouldn't go as far to call my mom a helicopter parent but she didn't like us wearing masks because of the limited visibility and harder to identify us when she would take us trick-or-treating when we were young. And honestly, we didn't care too much because at that age it wasn't about dressing up so much as the co

DC has always been this city in the midst of a relatively benevolent identity crisis. I think a lot of that comes from having a new administration every four to eight years changing up the organizational landscape of the town and its workforce continually. Another factor is that the District of Columbia, as a habitable establishment rather than just the center of the federal government, really didn't come into its own until the New Deal and subsequent Second World War as the Roosevelt Administration expanded the role and size of the federal government leading many to move to city to live and work; a metropolis born from poverty and wartime. Despite this boom, DC has never been a particularly big city and endured great damage, both structurally and psychologically, during the race riots of the late 1960s and general civil unrest that saw many major American cities descend into crime throughout the 1970s; as Mayor, Marion Barry once bragged that upon the removal of murder statistic

I grew up in a family that loved Halloween. My grandparents would adorn their home in Falls Church with fake cobwebs and place a terra cotta jack-o'-lantern with its illuminated grin flanked by genuine pumpkins. My grandmother would keep a tattered black witch's hat (which, I'm relatively sure, was older than me) in the closet which she would throw on to hand out fistfuls of Snickers and Milky Ways to the neighborhood trick-or-treaters. My father had taken this seasonal memento mori and made it a year-round thing. My love of film really is something descended down from my father and my grandfather but whereas my grandfather favored a good, old John Wayne picture ( Rio Bravo and The Quiet Man usually being at the top of the list and, subsequently, the top of mine), my father leaned more into horror with a particular penchant for the Universal Monsters. Watching these old, black and white flicks nearly as old as my grandfather on dusty old Betamax tapes were regular occas

There's a reason why music from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin has endured for decades: It's really fucking good. Classic rock, or "dad rock" as I've taken to calling it after years of being playfully teased for listening to oldies stations on the radio, just have that timeless quality in a blend of luck and magic usually fueled by soaring guitars, a groovy bassline, and a propulsive drumbeat. They're bands I would listen to riding in the back of my dad's old, blue 1980 Toyota Corolla, the vinyl covers flaking off revealing the aged, yellow foam padding underneath. They're bands that my father had old records of that would crackle from the turntable he had had since college that warm static flow emanating off the wood panel walls throughout the basement. And the first person I knew by name to guide me through that magical mystery tour into the great wide open that is rock and roll, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead was a man

Is New York City at least the best city in the United States? I've stared at that opening question for a couple minutes searching for my own answer to it. Look, I get why people don't like New York. It's loud, dirty, everyone seems particularly in hurry and a lot of folks can come off as short or rude. The traffic is terrible, the parking is even worse, and the subway smells horrendous especially in the summer. Living-wise, the rent is laughably ludicrous especially for the astonishingly tiny amount of space you're paying for. But I wouldn't have it any other way. When I was a kid, New York was still cleaning up. The porno theaters, drug dealers, and hookers that used to line Times Square had been gone for years by the first time I started visiting but it was still pretty rough around the edges with quite a few neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan you still didn't want to go to alone or after the sun went down. My family that lived there (and still does) lived i