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Not unpublished by choice, but rather by many, many rejections. Maybe these pieces will find a home someday, but in the meantime, I wanted to give them shelter somewhere other than in the recesses of my C drive. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. Maybe you’ll like them so much, they’ll make you wonder why they were ever rejected in the first place.

Personal Essays

The Final Lesson from My Terminal Professor
The Pain That Burns
Why We Still Play (Even Though We’re Past Our Prime)

Fiction

In the Present
Step on a Crack
To Kill the Pain

The Final Lesson from My Terminal Professor

Long before Randy Pausch delivered his heartrending Last Lecture in 2007, a Cornell University professor was doing the same thing. In fact, Will Provine had been doing them for several years. With a tumor lodged in his brain, he knew that when it came out of remission, he’d be dead within a couple weeks—and he’d already lived several years longer than what his doctors expected.

Rather controversial for his strong opposition to the afterlife, Provine taught Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (BIOEE207), a core course at Cornell. Every time he taught its final class of semester, he’d do so as if it’d be his last, talking about life and death and what it means to be a member of the human species. Every student in the course—even the truant ones—attended it.

I took Provine’s course in fall 2003 and his “last” lecture that semester. As I sat there, Provine revealed something that made his last lecture culminate in a way that only I knew. But rather than sharing it with him after the lecture was over, I walked out of Kennedy Hall and held onto what I knew for years—years that Provine’s doctors said he didn’t have. [Read Full Version]

The Pain That Burns

According the McGill Pain Scale, what my best friend suffers from is some of the most excruciating pain one can experience.

Worse than unprepared childbirth.

Worse than amputation.

Worse than cancer.

It’s a debilitating chronic pain called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS)—formerly known as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD)—a condition in which the nervous system malfunctions and sends pain signals to the brain long after whatever injury precipitated it has healed. The pain grows disproportionate to that of the injury, making its sufferers writhe to the point that even a gentle touch is painful. In most cases, the pain remains localized, staying in the region of the body—usually a limb—where the injury occurred. The pain is so excruciating that some sufferers choose to have the affected limb amputated just to rid themselves of the pain. In my friend’s case, however, it spread throughout his entire body to the point that it has reduced him to a 36-year-old invalid. [Read Full Version]

Why We Still Play
(Even Though We’re Past Our Prime)

Twenty years ago, I had a high school baseball coach who berated me to the point that I quit the team. In spite of being the team’s starting second baseman, I decided that there was no more baseball for me in Horsham, Pennsylvania—the Philadelphia suburb where I grew up. But I loved the game too much to walk away for good.

At the age of 38, I still play in a Washington, D.C.-area adult baseball league, a league competitive enough that most of the players played in college. Whether or not every one of us played collegiate baseball, there’s one thing that we all have in common, other than our love for the game. If you go down the batting order, each player will tell you about a coach who tried to extinguish his love for the game. If we didn’t encounter that coach in high school, then we encountered him in college—a coach who didn’t concern himself with the role baseball would play in our respective futures, maybe because we were never going to become professional players.  [Read Full Version]

In the Present

So I did the only other thing I could think to do: I kissed her.

I’d been with Sam for what, a month? And she was so free and fresh out of college. I mean, that girl broke into the world around her as if she wanted to consume everything all at once. I live in the present. That was her line. Almost like she wore it as some sort of bright red name tag that said ‘Hi My Name Is” and in the white space below it she wrote “Samantha and I live in the present.” It appeared to be her mantra, something she’d want inscribed on her gravestone. I’d never thought about a mantra for myself, but I knew if I had to come up with something to be remembered by, that wouldn’t have been it. [Read Full Version]

Step on a Crack

When I walked into her party, the very first thing she did was introduce me to a group of her ex-boyfriends. Her ex-boyfriends. Guys from the Main Line or maybe even Manayunk dressed in tailored slacks and pricy polos and standing with such poster board posture beside the food table.  

And that’s where she left me, packed alongside those guys in her Center City condo as if we were all a bunch of sausage links jammed together. She went off, gliding around her party as if everything were okay—which I’d say was kind of a problem. Sure, maybe we were all pieces of sausage, just swappable links of floppy, pre-packaged meat. But that didn’t change the fact that of all the pieces of meat out there, I was the one she now called her boyfriend. [Read Full Version]

To Kill the Pain

The clock wouldn’t leave me alone until, one by one, thirty of its minutes passed, sixty of them passed, the night passed, and it was all so futile. So I slid out from under my warm blanket, the one my mother knit, and pushed myself off the bed.

I rubbed my face, stepping around the colorful pictures scattered on my bedroom floor. They sat mixed up in small, cluttered piles surrounding the envelopes I’d taken them from. Plastic pouches of old negatives peeked outside of those envelopes. Negatives, I thought. I remember negatives.

I opened my dresser and stared at my clothes, all folded and organized. I grabbed a pair of ripped jeans, a black hoodie, and tossed them on my bed. I picked out some other shirts, light sweaters with collars, and tossed them onto my duffel bag. All of the clothes unraveled mid-air. What do you even wear to something like this, anyway? Is there even anyone out there to ask? If there was someone, I didn’t know how to find them, and if I did, I doubt they’d know what to say. [Read Full Version]

Operation Nicky McNickerson

A romantic comedy, of course. [Read Full Version]