Yesterday morning, we headed out to Hersheypark. When I say "we," I mean my brother and I, mom, and dad. It was my first trip out there in two years, and it was not as much fun as that last trip. Last time, I was just starting to date Allison, mom and dad were still married, I didn't know what it was like when someone close has a nervous ( Read more... )

"The regimen consisted of six basic rules that Napoleon followed religiously, except in his last two campaigns, when he was defeated by the Fifth Coalition in the War of Liberation and by Marie Louise in a battle that was never named ( Read more... )

Rita Serafina (Sarah) Shortino ( Read more... )

Yesterday, mom moved her clothes out. Dad sat at the kitchen table, wavering between severely depressed and homicidal. He ran into my mother and her new boyfriend last night, and he described the scene to me. I took it all in, and I felt like Dr. Mierzwiak in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," in that scene where he says "Yes, I suppose ( Read more... )

That "whoa" was meant to be long, exaggerated, and possibly in a foreign accent. Not just any foreign accent, but Russian. Or Yugoslavian. Basically, anything Eastern European. I was at work the other day, and there was a woman named Leni. If you want to know why that scares me, look up Leni Riefenstahl (IMDB.com or Wikipedia.org will have ( Read more... )

Hello to the six of you who read this. This is an update on my life, and it won't be poetic or pretty, it'll just be fact ( Read more... )

This is not a real entry. This is so I pop up on your friends' page and you look and you say "John Shortino still exists." This is a statement of intention, I will not disappear. This is a question posed: what makes home what it is? Is it diner food and a cold bed and just vastness and whiteness and white trash in the diner in such volume that ( Read more... )

Georgetown looks like a Christmas card when you pass it from the highway. Going underneath down near K Street, as the car passes under, the lights coming off of the tree get larger and then pull back as you disappear from it. When you walk there, it's a little different. In a car, you get this silent kind of isolation; things exist, but at that ( Read more... )

Around the fortieth punch, you lose count. It's dark, that's the problem. My karate professor decided class would be run this week like they used to teach karate in Japan when it was outlawed; in the night, in silence. The air is filled only with soft counting in Japanese, meaningless to so many American students, and sharp breaths with every ( Read more... )

fact: religion and philosophy address the same issue, namely the lonliness of humanity. religion creates a God and Devil to fill the void, philosophy embraces that void. There is not despair in embracing it when you know that being able to hold on to a real person is just about a billion times better than clinging to the myth of deity ( Read more... )