January 12 — My friend John is in prison. He got Covid in one lockup, and after days of getting sicker, he was taken to a local hospital, and then a bigger one, farther away. I saved an illicit recording on my phone from him, left from a hospital in…

The Answer To ‘Now What?’ I was lucky. In my early thirties, I got a new boss, who taught me how to be a good manager, and how to promote television. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but twenty years later I realized what he’d done: methodically and intentionally…

A Year Spent Paying Attention This morning I noticed that once again, I’m 66. Strangely, this year on earth is not rushing by. And not just because each day contains one more impossible outrage by the Current Administration, nor because each week reveals more evidence that Mother Earth will soon…

From “Shotgun” To “Save Me” To “Freak Out” and Beyond — I’m in the front seat of a convertible with the top up, my father driving the two of us home from the only Boston Bruins game we ever attended, and I can recall not a single moment of hockey from that night. Neither one of us is or will be…

The celebrities in my life. What’s it like to be a celebrity? Or to be pals with a famous person? I spent a year working with Oprah at her daily show, seeing her most work days, interacting with her a lot, sitting a few times in a limousine with her…

Come with me, won’t you, and imagine yourself immersed in this real-life, low-stakes equanimity experiment: Emerge from the medical lab bathroom with your warm, stoppered urine sample, and return to the room where moments ago, a calm, professional technician withdrew a few gallons of your blood for routine analysis. Notice…

Drinking coffee after getting up late, the morning after the show, I recalled a cluster of psychedelic buttons for sale at the suburban head shop in my hometown fifty years ago, one in particular that read, “Clapton is God.” At the time I didn’t know who Skip James (who wrote…

With Oscar approaching, our intrepid deadbeat ducks into seven cinemas. Fun, right? A different theater, a movie I haven’t seen, by myself, every day for a week. I have the time, I love going to the movies, and I’m a willing guinea pig, since this marathon will be far less…

“Cute–“ the one-word review a friend texted, having seen what I was about to watch, in an enormous, overheated, nearly empty chain cinema in the Chelsea neighborhood of bloody freezing Manhattan — gave me pause. Is “cute” how I want to conclude my week-long movie immersion? I settled on it…