This was the end to a nearly flawless week split between Middletown and Brooklyn. Thursday night I left the Goldsmith Cinema humming all the different anthems permanently tattooed in my brain after a lifetime of watching MGM's iconic smash-up of fairy tales, Tin Pan Alley schmaltz and American Gothic nostalgia - "The Wizard of Oz". The difference ( Read more... )

Just received word that my college president, or rather, the person who was president during my time at Wesleyan, has passed away at the ripe old age of 88. I think all of us "Campbell Kids" have secretly been aware that this day would arrive someday. It was just that in our mind's eye, Colin would forever be the thirty-three year-old wunderkind ( Read more... )

There was a poetry reading Thursday evening. It caught my eye because it was sponsored by an organization called, "The Route 9 Literary Collective", a reference to the four-lane highway that carries one to and from Hartford and Old Saybrook and which is visible from the balcony of my studio in Middletown, It's also th quickest way to get to New ( Read more... )

I was fairly lazy about journaling my dreams last year. Real life was pretty fraught with COVID-19 and not aging terribly well. Dreaming felt like a luxury even though I persisted in having them. Even without keeping notes, however, I could still notice certain consistent themes. For example, they mostly consisted of dreams involving current events ( Read more... )

Word from Bud Spurgeon arrived last week that one of our best friends from college passed away in mid-July. I last saw Steve in 2012 at he and Bud's 40th Reunion in Middletown. Had I not been so deeply gob smacked by Mom's illness at the time, I probably would have blogged on that event when it happened. It involved a quick day trip to Connecticut ( Read more... )

Last night, we returned to out magnum opus, "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years". And, this time around we ran head first into The Enlightenment, that fertile hundred year period leadinng directly to the French Revolution and consequent backlash that led to the world's first "Man on a White Horse" - Napoleon Bonaparte. Consequently, it ( Read more... )

The past year has seen the introduction of a new category of dream for me and it is one where I am having pretty detailed and "real" sex with someone. It's odd that this would be happening now that I'm in my late sixties as opposed to when I was actually active sexually or when I was in the midst of some of my most tempestuous crushes, between the ( Read more... )

Spending time in Middletown always makes me nostalgic. The walks up the hill to the deli and the college Wawa put me in the thick of the Nixon Era and the penultimate days of my sexual innocence. I made friends easily; I don't remember ever being homesick. And yet, sexual passion was something that was both strange and largely kept in check. I ( Read more... )

This past week in Middletown marks the first time, since the beginning of my lease, that I was able to enlist the studio as a part of my social network. The highlight was having two guests over for a beer and pizza party. It was aided and abetted by the building management that has wisely chosen to use some of its slightly exorbitant rent roll to ( Read more... )

I'm in Middletown for my forty-sixth college reunion. I spent Thursday painting and decided I'd gone as far as I could on a three-year project having to do with Mom and the nursing home garden where we spent so many hours connected to eachother in her last years. As usual, I am stuck between my limited powers of draftsmanship and pretty good sense ( Read more... )