When I was a kid, Geauga Lake Amusement Park was a little slice of heaven. It had coasters, live entertainment, and games of chance. It was about an hour drive and as the ferris wheel and roller coaster came into view, our excitement spiked. It was o...
So a friend died this week. She was a wonderful person who was just barely 50 but caught a bad break with a rare disease. It just stinks. It stinks for her husband and her son. It stinks for her family. It stinks for her friends. But those of us who...
Tax season was a little rough for me this year. I got it all done but it’s not a chore I relish. I try not to think about it all year which means I scramble to find this piece of paper or that, so I’d be better off if I had a weekly habit of ... Read...
My wife, who is retired from the work force, tends to stay up late. Most nights, I stay up later than I should through sympathetic response. Like when you drive past people outside an ice cream store licking a cone, and decide you’d like ice cream; o...
The Sunday before last, as I drove to pickleball in the morning, my car slid on some ice and hit another car. It was something of a perfect storm as the car I hit was a commercial-grade flatbed truck and the corner of the flatbed rolled up the hood o...
We have just gotten past the Winter Olympics and once again I’d like nothing more than to join a curling club and slide those stones down a bumpy bed of ice at five o’clock in the morning, which is when you usually have to do those sort of things bec...
Way back in eighth grade, I was on a travel hockey team and we had a game in Hamilton, Ontario against another bantam team, which was about a four-hour drive from Cleveland. The plan was to drive east, stop in Shaker Heights to pick up two kids who w...
My first published piece of fiction was a huge mistake and almost ruined my writing career before it started. Nevertheless, it was a valuable lesson that took me years to understand and internalize in a way that made me a better person. Also, I’m sti...
This is a very special Mickey Picayune in that I’m mostly sharing a giveaway for books at the end of this email. I have a shorter-than-usual story because my brain hurts at the moment and I need to give it some rest. Why does my brain hurt? A month a...
On my seventh birthday, right after second grade, I asked for a guitar as my gift. My mom took me to the music store at the end of our street and let me pick it out. She also signed me up for lessons. It was great. I didn’t do anything with it that f...