I’m sitting on my balcony a few weeks back, assembling some ingenious piece of journalism, when the sound of demons screwing shoots across the lawn and deep into my bones. I vault out of my armchair, dodge out of my room, and pound down the staircase and through the front door, a dark curse on…
I usually go home for Easter, but the ancient Price is Right spinner the pope uses to decide when the holiday falls landed on the 21st this year, also the birthday of my girlfriend, Jody. She wanted to combine the two celebrations and have an Easter egg hunt. But we couldn’t just have an ORDINARY…
I’ve always really enjoyed dancing. Wait, that’s not true. If I delve TRULY far back, the first time I remember dancing was at camp the summer before fifth grade with a girl much larger than me. This wasn’t exactly UNUSUAL at that age, what with girls hitting puberty earlier, but my friends at the time…
I trotted down from the Harrier Hill parking lot and into a broad field filled with sunlight, a few early-spring birds, and a distinct lack of shotgun blasts. I was on my way to the Stockport-Greenport Trail, a ridiculously underutilized path stretching from Harrier Hill Park to the Greenport Conservation Area outside Hudson in Columbia…
I was walking down Warren Street in Hudson, smoking a cigarette (I assume) when I saw what appeared to be an inter-species romance: two birds mid-air with talons intertwined, the smaller bird cruising upside down under the larger one. It turned out the smaller bird was dead. The larger one (which I later identified as…
While cruising up the Hudson River from NYC on a rarely-punctual Amtrak last Monday, I was able to reflect on the positives of the city, an unusual moment for someone who generally squints angrily when people go on extended raves about the place. I’m a rabid Hudson Valley fan, and there is little room left…
Sometimes, it’s necessary in life to be objective. I find this extra-helpful when something ridiculously unpleasant is happening — you just picture yourself as an actor in some ribald comedy and laugh along with the audience. It’s how I got through most of my 20s. I was forced to apply this coping mechanism a couple…
It has been a particularly intense midterm season. I should know, because I’ve been covering it since September 2017, before (self-props) anyone else was. Now, 13 months later, it is election day. I just left my local polling place after voting (no, I’m not going to tell you who for), and there was a 15-person…
Smoking isn’t really ‘in’ these days, for the same reasons that slathering one’s body with tanning oil at the beach isn’t ‘in’ — it’s smelly, it’s bad for your skin, it gives you cancer, and doctors have been making condescending remarks to us about it for decades. So less and less people are smoking, which…
There are few things I hate in this world, but one of them is lawns. Not necessarily YOUR lawn. I respect the American ideal of property rights, and therefore believe you have the legal precedent to do whatever goddamn stupid thing you want to do with your lawn. You all seem to have the same…
The Other Hudson Valley 