I’ve listened to probably 200 of Marc Maron’s WTF interviews. When you listen to anyone talk that much, you’re bound to hear him come back to the same ideas over and over. And one of my favorites has always been this: “Everyone needs that guy, that guy who introduces you to all the good music. He’s older, he somehow knows about everything before anyone else, he’s that guy.” For me, that guy was Tom Rainey.

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I want Hillary Clinton to be our next president because I think she’s the most qualified person to lead this country. I don’t particularly like her, but we won’t be carpooling or anything so I fail to see why that matters.

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One gorgeous Autumn evening in Boston, probably in 2009, Cathy and I were at Fenway watching the Red Sox. I got a text from a friend with whom I hadn’t spoken in a while, Chris Powell. Chris and his wife Steph were old friends from high school. We loved them dearly. The text read, “Spend New Year’s in Vegas with us!”

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Facebook is a wonder to behold. Everyone is on it, everyone uses it in the way in which they are most comfortable. Some people lurk and don’t post much. Some people post too much. Everyone kind of does their own thing, which I think is part of the beauty of it.

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There’s something I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around lately: there are so many double standards when it comes to sex. Are we trying to rid ourselves of all of them? Equality sounds good in theory, but it’s a pretty tall order once you start to disect what it really means.

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When Cathy and I were living in Champaign, Illinois, we had a cordless phone. (Click here if you don’t know what that is.)

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The next morning, I called his old school. Nate’s branch had closed down, but there were still four or five open branches downtown. A lot of his friends from his old school were at these branches so we thought we’d start there.

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A couple of months ago, my oldest son got kicked out of daycare. This is something I didn’t think could actually happen, but all of a sudden, there we were.

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One day in the summer of 1994, I went over to my best friend Joel’s house. He had just finished his first year of college; I was about to be a senior in high school. We watched a movie and then another and then another. Then somehow it was 6:00 a.m. and we were still awake so he said, “let’s go to the mall!” Oddly enough, this was before drinking and drugs were a part of our lives.

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Picture a metal box with four levers on top. They are labeled as follows: price, location, size, safety. Move one of the levers up to 10, the others go down. When you’re buying a home, this is the game you play.

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