The other night, I was sitting in the Providence Place food court, watching as the girl behind the counter at the Dale & Thomas popcorn stand slipped a small wad of bills from the till into her pocket. I found myself distracted from the scene by the piped-in muzak, which normally hides in the background of the shopping experience but had become surprisingly intrusive.

The 2004 Boston Red Sox were a magical team, insofar as they transformed the psyche of an entire region. They even reached out to touch the lives of non-Sox fans like myself. A true story: October 16, 2004, the date of Game 3 of that year's American League Championship Series, was when my wife and I became engaged to be married on the platform of an Orange Line MBTA station. The game drifted in and out of our evening out in Boston, score updates coming from restaurant televisions and bus drivers and strangers on the street. The highly improbable final score, 19-8, corresponds to the dates in May upon which we were both born. Of course, it was the last game the 2004 Red Sox would lose, and we felt like we had tapped into the mythology, curse or no curse.

The portal that separates sleeping dream and wakeful reality is a dark egress, but it's hard to tell the difference between the two when morning comes early with a knock at the window and the glowing honeycomb of a flashlight.

So yeah, life on a navy base is pretty good, thanks. It's not for everyone, obviously, because they don't let everyone in. At the gate, they ask you for your military identification card, your car registration, and the reason you're there in 25 words or less. If any of these aren't good enough, they send you right back onto the road, via a narrow lane protected on either side by jersey walls. There's a war on, and there are secrets here that need to be kept secret.

If you take the biological drive, nerve endings and psychology out of it, would humans necessarily want to engage in the measures that we currently know as "sex?" I mean, if it wasn't obvious that a particular man-part fit into another woman-part, if that wasn't the gateway to reproduction, if the operation didn't have the capability of unleash overwhelming emotions, would we have any use for those particular physical measures?

Originally posted 3/13/2003

I'm reminded now of the old folk tale, the story of the oilseller.

There was once a man who tended a small grove of olive trees. He was, by all accounts, a kind and simple person who had no enemies whatsoever. His wife had died many years earlier, but not before giving him a son. In time, the boy grew to adulthood and moved away.

There are 303 million people in America, according to population estimates. From that number, 60 percent are between 20 and 64 years old, which is to say that there are 180 million people demographically capable of participating in our adult economy. This doesn't count the many younger Americans who carry functioning wallets and bank accounts, or the unknown millions of folks without official government-issued paperwork, but that only serves to make the folowing points even less impressive.

Originally posted 10/27/2002

John Donne spent his early adult years as a fancy-lad, wasting the large fortune he inherited from his iron-magnate father on books, plays, wine and women. After doing some successful networking during the Earl of Essex's sailing expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores, he was granted a prestigious position as secretary to the powerful Sir Thomas Edgerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. It seemed that John's life-path was set; he was well on his way towards a long, successful career in English politics. Indeed, he was elected to Parliament in 1601.

"They" don't ask me for writing advice, and the reasons for that should be pretty self-evident. But if they did ask me for writing advice, I'd puff my chest out, clear my throat. Then I'd place a tender hand on their shoulder in a slightly condescending faux-fatherly way, flashing the kind of eye-twinkle that can only be perfected through countless hours in front of the bathroom mirror. Finally, I'd lean in and whisper, "Use the return key."

When Corinne was young, she saw the universe in spite of the world. She pulled back the curtains and gazed out the window of her second-floor room, past the gabled roofs of her neighborhood, beyond the scruffy treeline and battered mountain range, out at a milk-colored sky and all that lay behind it. She was a nanoscale atom in a limitless cosmos, and that was proof she was free. Being tiny was her greatest advantage.