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…

The Great White North is normally a peaceful realm of dark forests and endless frozen tundra.

But now these much-too-polite Canadians are rushing from their igloos and log cabins and trailer parks in angry revolt. Consumers have discovered that their butter no longer reverts to puddles of oily gloop at room temperature like it used to, but instead remains solid, and they want to know why.

At the heart of the Buttergate scandal is the Canadian dairy industry’s use of cow feed supplements that contain palm oil. Julie Van Rosendaal reports in The Globe and Mail that half the dairy…

I hate the word ‘sustainability’.

Why? Because it has sexual overtones. Like “How long can he sustain an erection?”

Years ago, I used to worry about that. I learned early that scoring depends a lot on how well one carries the ball toward an ever-shifting goal post.

I also hate the word sustainability because it smacks of ‘corporate speak,’ the verbal equivalent of a blank stare. Corporate speak is the idiom that CEOs and professional politicians use to make their employees and constituents think they’re in the know, as if what they did were so esoteric and complicated that only…

Natalie recalled her golf coach’s advice about teeing-off.

“Step up to the tee and address the ball.”

“Hello, ball,” she muttered, sotto voce. She shuddered at the very thought of sand traps, water hazards, trees and shrubs, and the so-called ‘rough’ were small, and sometimes not-so-small, boys searched for lost balls to sell back to the golfers.

“Wanna buy it back?” he snarled. She didn’t really. But the kid looked so menacing with those close-set, beady eyes and pointy snout like an ugly ferret and the swastika tattoo that decorated the jugular vein in his neck and the fire red…

In the first week of October, Jacob Mortillaro booked passage on the French steamship St. Nazaire sailing from Genoa to New York via Marseille and Gibraltar using the money that his friend Manufredi had wired him. He caught the morning train at Termini Station in time to put himself on the Genoa waterfront by nightfall.

As her husband changed trains at Florence, then Viareggio and La Spezia faded into the distance, Anna Mortillaro gathered whatever family heirlooms she could find and delivered these to the nearest pawnbroker. Over the next months, she would make more visits to this small, bearded…

This short story represents Chapter Two of the unpublished novel The Cranesbill. For Chapter One, see A Gentleman Always Lifts the Seat.

Ginger Martin stared through the open sash at the potted plant she’d placed outside on the fire escape. It was a small cranesbill with furry green leaves and a clutch of emerging redbuds in a terracotta pot that the flower shop clerk had gifted her on the previous afternoon. Afterward, she’d visited the public library, where a horticultural guide suggested cranesbills were associated with stupidity and folly. She should talk to her cranesbill, the attractive and friendly shop…

I watched the January Sixth Rebellion in real time, from its inception at Freedom Plaza, to the ignominious assault on the Capitol buildings, to Nancy Pelosi’s indignant rebukes of a gloating president. There was never but a single thought in my own mind.

This is the end.

I mean ‘end’ as in the final page of a great book that you just can’t put down or the last reel of a film you hoped might never end. The end of everything.

Why? Because when you clutch an all-powerful remote in your paws and nobody can take it from you, it’s…