Posts by Keith Howard
Some kids are cruel. Others just… curious with a mean streak. I wasn’t evil—but wicked? Absolutely. Wickedness is disruption without a mission, a laugh aimed squarely at the wrong authority. This one’s about how one laugh, wrong‑time, wrong‑place, ended up being exactly right.
Desire isn’t polite. It shows up early, misfires often, and makes a fool out of you long before it ever makes you human. These are the first sparks: a six-year-old whispering into a two‑by‑four, a minnow drafted into romance, a flood in God’s living room. Not exactly a love story, but close enough to bruise.
Pompous Jackassery and Mortal Concerns exists because I’ve failed at every other literary form. Novelist? Barely passable. Journalist? Unfit. Poet? Please. Essayist? Marginally above average—which is just enough to crash and burn among the illiterati. A sensible man would accept his creative fate and spend his evenings trying not to stare into the sun or eat too many crayons before dinner. I am not that man.
The woods behind my house smelled of pine sap, wet moss, and the metallic tang of mud. To me, they weren’t woods but a travel hub for everything extinct or imaginary. Dinosaurs stomped through sandy patches. Crocodiles blinked from rocks that weren’t rocks yesterday. The Cherokee whispered peace terms in the wind, smoke from their fires mixing—somehow—with the neighbor’s leaf pile.
The Guinness Book is full of lunatics chasing immortality.
Men who dunk their heads for apples until their lungs give out. Women who crochet scarves so long they could strangle Rhode Island. One guy painted the same baseball eighteen thousand times until it ballooned into a yoga ball. Another piled up 8,226 Batman trinkets, because apparently Gotham didn’t need his help.
Three Tales of Misplaced Royalty, Existential Pancakes, and the Queen of the Sunrise Café
Three Tales of Misplaced Royalty, Existential Pancakes, and the Queen of the Sunrise Café
Nobody asked for this column. Nobody. You don’t roll over in bed thinking, “God, I hope Keith Howard tells me about his childhood crushes today.” And yet here I am, kicking down the door anyway. I wrote a memoir, Unclaimed, But Loud. Four hundred pages of memory, confession, and polite detonations. Some readers say it’s good. I say it’s cheaper than therapy and with fewer co-pays, though with slightly more swearing.
But Rob? Rob’s earned something special as we near the end of this trip. A poetic salute. An accolade. And this? I’ve written two different versions, each of which fails in different ways. The third version, at the end, is the only one worth a warm pitcher of spit.
I’ve been to a few services. Last night, though. Last night hit different. Usually I check my pockets before I go, but a tiny miracle must’ve crawled out of one. For some time between a few nanoseconds and a lifetime, my brain quit yammering. It sat down, got real quiet behind my face. And in that stillness, I slipped somewhere. Maybe a trance. Maybe a meditation. Maybe a short walk into a parallel dimension. It was so like nothing it was one of the best somethings I’ve ever had. This church is heaven—even if it has no opinion about anything.
Today, our big trip flips. This isn’t just pretty deserts or cold coastlines anymore. This is Africa the way every kid imagines it. Wide-eyed, lions-on-the-savanna Africa. And in some freak stroke of genius (luck, really), we’ve saved the best for last. Cake after dinner. Ice cream, maybe even sprinkles.
In Manchester, every inch of space is spoken for, with billboards and coffee shops clamoring for your attention. Out here, the land is the boss, indifferent to whether you notice or not. It’s in this vastness that you realize being far apart isn’t about miles; it’s about the silence between thoughts, the moment when the world stops spinning long enough for you to catch your breath and feel, really feel, the weight of nothing.
This column is my version of hitting rewind, catching you up on what the hell has been happening since I last put pen to paper. Think of it as a crash course in my current reality.
Please excuse the rest of this column. I take pride in my contrarian nature, in my ability to identify clouds on any horizon. Today, though, is not a day for me to be philosophical or intellectual. It’s a day to freaking celebrate!
You haven’t heard from me in a few months. I do hope you enjoyed the respite, because that silence has ended, beginning today with a mea culpa. I apologize to all the InkLink readers who contacted me offering support, to the members of Hope Nation who kept me in their prayers, to the countless folks in the larger recovery community who sent texts and emails of love and support, to my old Army buddy, Ryszard Guziewicz, to the InkLink’s Editor/Publisher/Grand-Poohbah, Carol Robidoux, and to dozens of others. I am sorry. I didn’t respond to many of your inquiries about my health, each sent with love and compassion. It was wrong but necessary to have isolated in a cocoon composed of my wife and daughters, along with a very small group of close friends. Thank you all, and please accept my apology.
