This country is spiritually unwell, my friends.

Finished teaching for the week—flipping the ankle strap on my Crocs to the forward position.

Best Hamlet film adaptation? Even though it’s gutted, I’ll confess to really loving Franco Zeffirelli’s Lethal Hamlet.

A breathtaking package from River Styx! Issue 107 featuring my story ARMO printed in such high quality. Feels great in my hands, like a real book. Get yours and read my Western about Armenians being made American. Thanks once more to Aaron Gwyn for the early thumbs up.

FULL METAL JACKET is about a divided character (peace + born to kill) who becomes a fully-integrated person.

At the film’s climax, Joker raises his pistol to put an enemy sniper out of her misery. The moment he fires, the peace sign is eclipsed: all we see is KILL.

Twelve Films to Know Me:

1. Miller’s Crossing
2. Seven Samurai
3. Heat
4. The Proposition
5. Jaws
6. Hell or High Water
7. Goodfellas
8. Reservoir Dogs
9. Taxi Driver
10. The Insider
11. Rounders
12. Full Metal Jacket

my Bible shelf:

“I don’t write ‘em, I just hang on to the pen and God sends ‘em through.”—Hank Williams

choose any longish paragraph from your WIP and rewrite it using words of only one syllable

just in from the wizards Friedman Amps—

I handwrite all first drafts of short stories and novels. I’m a huge believer in this as a methodology.

Also, I never learned to type.

my Beckett shelf:

4 Favorite Novels:

1. Blood Meridian
2. Absalom, Absalom!
3. Moby-Dick
4. Ulysses

People keep responding to my Hemingway tweet by telling me he was “deeply flawed.”

Yes. He was. And all of us are, too.

The thing is, while Hemingway was deeply flawed, he was also ERNEST F**KING HEMINGWAY.

Most of us are deeply flawed and sell mortgages or something.