I have never really bought into the notion that all Pitbulls are vicious attack dogs. I firmly believe that any dog is a product of its owner’s handling and training.

In my entire life’s experience as a large-breed dog owner and lover, I’ve seen more German Shepherds randomly attack than Pitbulls.

However, I just experienced one of the most terrifying moments of my life. So terrifying that I had violent shakes for hours after it occurred.

I occasionally work through an app called Rover and regularly walk neighborhood dogs, but over the weekend I was hired to house-sit a Pitbull…

I remember a time when you could be the cool kid on the writing block who had a novel idea. It was called blogging and I started it way back when it wasn’t a thing yet.

Social media also wasn’t a big thing back in those days. It was beautifully organic when you had to work to attract an audience and an audience had to intentionally seek you out.

Blogging was so satisfying during that time because you knew that when someone wanted to know about your topic they searched for it, found it, and appreciated it.

And you knew…

I have just regressed to the stone age for the first time since technology was invented.

I have begun physically writing down all my logins and passwords in a paper journal and believe me, there are many more than I’d think about in an average day.

This archaic method that I’ve resorted to is the result of one thing only. Switching laptops.

I’ve had a brand-spankin’ new laptop sitting in my home for TEN months and have neglected to use it for two reasons:

1. It belonged to my late son and for the first few months, it just felt wrong.
2. …

The other night I sat down and turned on the TV which happened to be tuned into a station broadcasting the 2020 Olympic opening ceremonies…in 2021. The first sign this is an Olympics like no other.

As I watched country after country marching into the stadium it seemed normal at first. But then the camera zoomed in a bit and I realized the multicolored bleachers were not people. They were just chairs sitting empty.

What happened next was completely involuntary.

I spontaneously combusted into tears. Overwhelming emotion washed over me in waves when I realized that thousands of athletes from…

Thanks to Anu Anniah and Celine Lai I had been made aware of Medium’s new “Lists” feature before Medium even made us aware of it.

Since reading both of their articles I began the arduous task of backtracking two and a half years to create my lists. When I say arduous, believe it. When you have a back-catalog of nearly 400 stories, it takes a full day to scroll through story titles and choose which lists to add them to.

What I found is that the farther back I went, the slower and clunkier Medium became. …

Heartbreak Alert!

I regularly shop at two different Walmarts in my city. Both of them have several sparrows living among the rafters. Somehow the birds get inside the stores but it seems as if they can never find their way out and it really messes with my inner peace.

When a sparrow chirps outside in nature it’s a cute and harmonious sound but when a sparrow trapped inside a big-box store chirps, somehow it rings out like a desperate cry for freedom.

The birds have no idea why or how they got trapped inside our human menagerie of consumerism. …

Covid restrictions have been lifted and I have now chosen a date for my son’s memorial service. The date will be eleven months after his death.

Part of me is glad that it’s taken nearly a year. Had I been able to do this immediately in a non-Covid world, there’s no way in hell I could have stood up in front of an audience and uttered any words that made sense. I was far too broken back then.

But if there’s one thing eleven months has done for me, it has given my feelings a lot of time to stew.

…

Would you donate your body to science if you knew how they treated it? It’s a question I had to ask myself after having patio drinks with a neighbor the other day.

The woman is a retired doctor and she went on to tell me how disrespectful and gruesome medical students behave with cadavers. Great patio chatter, right?

In her experience in med school, students didn’t just open up the bodies and do what they were directed to do. They played silly (sick) games and experimented with them.

I wouldn’t care what they’d do with my own body but I…