Posts by Nathan Graziano
The suite—which accommodates roughly 40 people—was air-conditioned[10] and spacious with modern couches and coffee tables with chips and pastry trays, a big screen television to our right while in front of us, through the window panes, Fenway Park stretched out unfettered by any obstructions, a truly idyllic view.
Maybe I’m not “a good boy.” Maybe I have no interest in being “a good boy” according to The Blonde Woman’s ideas about the concept. Maybe I’d prefer to live my life following my passions—I’m passionate about cheese and, yes, I will continue to beg for it—even it means indulging in my dark/“bad” side.
But I was apprehensive about starting “Tracy Flick Can’t Win” for a couple of reasons, which I’m also fairly certain that my fellow book-nerds will understand.
It happened so fast that I barely registered the whizzing of the firework heading straight at me. The base of the box had tipped over on the grass, and the last shot in the pack came zipping at me.
On this night, in the corner by the entrance, behind a pair of pool tables, Jonny Friday—a stalwart on the Manchester music scene and the host of the open mic nights at Angel City Music Hall—sets up for tonight’s acoustic open mic.
She loves sushi. You hate sushi. But right now—in the face of this grave discussion—you’re willing to make concessions. Besides, she’s your daughter and since the SCOTUS stripped her—and millions of other American women—of the basic human right to privacy over their own bodies, nothing has been palatable anyway.
While listening to the cacophony of jackhammers as the city installs sewers on my street[1], futilely attempting to finish a sentence amidst the pounding outside my house, I’m reminded why I prefer the night.
For all eternity, I’ll absorb the sensory images of the ballpark—the slap of the baseball, leather-on-leather, as it hits the catcher’s mitt; the solid crack of the bat on a gapper to left-center; linseed oil and freshly sheared grass and peanut shells on the concrete beneath the bleacher seats.
On June 16, The Youngsters, featuring the Milford-based folk trio Decatur Creek, will take the stage at The Rex Theater in Manchester to commune and connect using said common language of music.
I’m not a particularly demonstrative man, but I can distinctly recall the drive home from work after teaching my classes on December 14, 2012, when I pulled to the side of the road and cried.
Tom Cruise reprises his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the pompous fighter pilot who has remarkably exhibited zero-character growth or accumulated any life wisdom while whizzing into middle age and remaining “the fastest man alive.” Wee.
The first thing that caught my eye was three people standing in the far-right corner of the room, where one woman stood in a crucifixion pose while a middle-aged woman and a thin man with a thick graying Jerry Garcia-beard were scanning their hands over her like TFA agents at an airport.
And just like that, in a hyperbolic blink, my daughter Paige has finished her first year of college and moved her belongings[1] back into her childhood bedroom.
The Captain I know passed away on Sunday morning at age 48 after battling pancreatic cancer. He fought valiantly, but let’s be real: cancer is a motherfucker, and pancreatic is one of the worst. The Captain was my first cousin Jaime’s husband and my good friend, and I already miss him. But I don’t want this to be sullen or maudlin. The Captain would kick me square in the Richard if he knew I made this sullen or maudlin.
On Thursday, May 5—a manufactured “Mexican” holiday that gives amateur drunks an excuse to get sloshed on watery margaritas and warm Coronas—I encountered said crowds in downtown Manchester during the city’s Taco Tour and I freaked out. My social anxiety swelled like a broken toe, then I had to go.
Like a prepubescent moth falling in love with an illuminated bulb, I knew—in the marrow of my bones—that I’d found my calling with my Nintendo. But it wasn’t until my parents purchased “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out” for my 12th birthday[3] that I would actualize my role in the universe.
In April of 2002, Green Bean Press, a small independent publisher in New York City[1], released my first full-length book—a collection of interrelated short stories titled “Frostbite.” I can look back at “Frostbite” now, two decades later, and say, with the objectivity that age affords, that the book had no business seeing the light of day.
As I re-read the essay to discuss with my classes, in light of Will Smith’s “slap heard around the world,” which all my students were buzzing about, it occurred to me that—maybe—both stories were speaking to the same issue, something so ingrained in American males that it often goes unnoticed.
It’s the day before your birthday so stop reading the news. Stop thinking about that megalomaniac waging war in the Ukraine as soon as the pandemic started to wane. Stop obsessing about gas prices, and inflation, and your daughter’s college tuition, and the fact that being a human being of modest middle-class means these days is absolutely untenable. After all, you’re a just speck of dust in the dust-coated chaos of an eternal abyss.
