by Bill McCurry | Jul 18, 2019 | Entertainment, Family, Writing
When I was small, my parents would sing a certain lullaby to me. I don’t think I’ve heard it since. Like any writer, I took that tender memory and perverted for the sake of a story. I made a rough, funny character write and sing “The Whore...
by Bill McCurry | Oct 23, 2018 | Humor
There’s this thing called the Hero’s Journey, which is not the same as driving to El Paso with three kids in the back seat. It’s a type of story that is found in many different cultures at different times in history. In recent years Joseph Campbell explained it...
by Bill McCurry | Oct 10, 2018 | Acting, Travel
My wife and I dig Ghost Tours even though neither of us has ever seen anything in the least supernatural. We like enthusiastic tour guides, especially those playing costumed characters with conviction. We’ve ghost-toured in lots of cities such as New Orleans,...
by Bill McCurry | Sep 17, 2018 | Humor, Marriage, Relationships
My wife despises things that beep. Whenever a blackout ends, her first recovery checklist item is reprogramming every beeping thing in our house so that it becomes a non-beeping thing. So, when our security system randomly began beeping at me Wednesday night I knew...
by Bill McCurry | Aug 29, 2018 | Uncategorized
We all know that most Canadians are polite. I now know why. They sublimate their fury. Canadians drive like enraged Mongols. They walk through public places like they were electrons pinging around in a supercollider. I can only confirm that’s true for the ones in...
by Bill McCurry | Aug 28, 2018 | Marriage, Travel
When I walked into the restaurant last night my feet stuck to the floor. The smell of grease choked me up a little, and I couldn’t hear my wife over the pressure cookers and fans. I assumed the fans were there to keep the sole employee from exploding like a CO2...
by Bill McCurry | Aug 25, 2018 | Cats, Family, Humor
I am objectively a lousy father. Compared to my father, I am a psychotic crack addict trying to raise orchids in a toilet. It started with a rose-colored memory of my family’s driving vacations when I was a boy. Swinging through the western states and the national...
by Bill McCurry | Jun 12, 2018 | Family
I’ve been looking for a way to explain how I feel about my father dying. It’s as if I were born on a continent, and I played there, and I grew up falling, and getting back up, and figuring out how I fell. I went back there when I was proud. I went back...
by Bill McCurry | Jun 5, 2018 | Family, Life
There is a giant hole in the world shaped like my father. I can walk around it, but I can never fill it. He died this morning in his sleep, in his own bed, and without pain. Dying piles indignities on us, but he held on to more dignity than most. At age eighty-six he...
by Bill McCurry | Oct 17, 2014 | Communication, Humor, Love, Relationships
My wife never came right out and said she was distressed by our house and the fact that I live in it. I only became aware of her distress after years of examining various signs and back-trails. It was like tracking a bear that occasionally walks into your kitchen...
by Bill McCurry | Sep 10, 2014 | Cats, Family, Humor
My mom passed away exactly 2.54 years ago today. To mark this anniversary I’m sharing a brief anecdote from her life, one involving violence, drunkenness, profanity, and murder. Incidentally, this explains a lot about my behavior. Mom always detested one of her...
by Bill McCurry | Sep 9, 2014 | Communication, Confidence
Somewhere on the internet there’s a photo of me at a gargantuan beer festival. In this photo I’m young, and I’m sitting with my friends who are also young. They’re laughing and waving their beers and cigarettes in time with the polka music. My face is on the table,...
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