When BARBIE© hit the market in 1959, she cost $3. But don’t be fooled by the low sticker price. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $29 in 2020.

Which reminds me.

The SDNY has been making some threatening noises about a certain other Barbie’s inflated invoices to her Daddy’s GREAT AMERICA SUPER-PAC for so-called ‘consulting fees.’ Mister Cyrus Vance seems to think that’s improper. Actually, it’s worse than improper. It’s a felony, although given the insane fuckery of the Trump years, I’m not so sure it’s even a misdemeanor anymore, or anything more serious than a parking ticket.

Now your conventional Barbie©…

I’ll admit to creep-stalking my Ex on Facebook.

When she came back into my head, I decided to use the memories as model for the protagonist in one of my novels-in-progress and, as characters often do, she literally wrote herself into the story. I always Google the names of potential characters beforehand, kind of like a title search before buying a home. You want to know who might hold a lien on the property before committing to the purchase, though it’s not like Natasha herself ever belonged to me, or to anyone.

The most worrisome thing is that there are…

Ginger fell into the habit of arising late in the morning. For the first time in her life, there was nothing on her agenda; no classes to teach, no homework to correct, no meetings with parents, no proof-ready manuscripts to deliver to the agency. She was free to pursue her interest in writing at whatever pace suited her. Her only obligations were discharged during the first few minutes after lights out.

She started a list of writing prompts, then simply jotted down a random stream of consciousness that took no particular form or substance. On reading what she’d written, she…

I just watched the bodycam footage showing the takedown of Black Army Lieutenant Caron Nazario and it made me want to puke. My first thought was to thank God that my late father (MIA 1945) didn’t need to see this. What this country became doesn’t in any way, shape, or form resemble the one his generation sacrificed to preserve. It’s exactly what they fought against.

Readers know that I’m a loudmouth. It’s the story of my life. But better to speak out and be dragged to the slaughter kicking and screaming rather than whimpering while kissing the jackboots of the…

Candida patiently awaited Ginger’s postcard from Chicago that never came. Instead, there was an unexpected letter posted from an Allied military hospital at Le Havre. The war in Europe was over.

May 25, 1945

My Dearest Ginger,

After many months with no opportunity to write, here I am sending you a few words from France. I’m in a military hospital with other POWs who were liberated with me after the collapse of Germany. Now that the war is over, I will soon be returning stateside. …

A Fairchild C-123 aircraft with the label “Brünnhilde” emblazoned across its fuselage buzzed Agruafria in a low altitude, shallow arc in preparation for a night landing. The little airstrip remained without landing lights or radio beacon and for all intents and purposes, didn´t exist. This fat lady in her winged helmet had an identical twin sitting inside a hangar in Arkansas. Anyone asks, the Valkyrie never left Menton.

Hearing the droning aircraft approaching in the night sky, Dennis Roosevelt Boggs groped in semi-darkness for the hammock cord to try and steady himself. Normally, he slept with a lamp burning, at…

The aftermath of their frantic coupling was anticlimactic. Ginger had felt no pleasure in the act; instead she found only alienation, a profound disconnection from reality as if her body had been frozen in place while her mind wandered elsewhere. Hobbs’ style of intercourse was repulsive, something she would normally have refused to do for any amount of money, never mind the flimsy promise of a book contract sometime in the never-never. She felt more than ever like the cheap whore she suspected she’d become.

It was like alcoholism, she thought, or opium smoking or heroin addiction, the same, doing…