Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Category: Writing
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Some nights I sit with the silence and feel like I’m eavesdropping on my own past. The 1990s were the best decade of my life, and I don’t say that with any polished nostalgia or rose-tinted yearning for mixtapes, AOL Chatrooms, and pagers. I say it because I was still half-feral then—caught somewhere between a…
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Some names are given at birth—chosen in hospitals, whispered in delivery rooms, penned on certificates by people who may or may not have any real idea who we are yet. Others are earned through fire, dirt, resilience, and reputation. Still others are worn like armor, or masks, or sometimes both, depending on the day. The…
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I was nineteen years old, back in the Adirondacks, working as a counselor at Camp Chateaugay—the same damn place I was sent to as a kid. That summer felt like a loop closing in on itself. Same dirt roads, same lake, same kind of kids. On our nights off, we all went to the Owlout.…
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This past weekend, I drove back to the place where my story began. The road to my mother’s house is the same as it’s always been. That drive always stirs something in me. A reminder of who I was before the world turned hard and unforgiving. I didn’t just go to see my mom. I…
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There comes a moment in every life—every soul forged in fire, tested by wind, worn down by time and lifted by impossible grace—when you look at the sky and realize the storm isn’t passing over. It’s waiting. Waiting for you to stop standing there like a goddamn monument and move. That’s where I am today.…
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Out of nowhere, my former niece Makayla—who, decades ago, for all intents and purposes, had become my unofficially adopted daughter—reached out and asked if I could pick her up. The timing was uncanny. She called while I was out with Amelia, and the moment I learned she needed a ride as soon as possible, I…
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The sky was a canvas of pastel hues, as the sun descended in a final blaze of glory. The moon, a luminescent orb, rose slowly into the night, casting a mystical glow upon the earth. As the stars twinkled in the inky blackness, the moon and the sun shared a timeless embrace, a dance of…
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I was twenty-three when they sent me home. Three summers of devotion, three years of sunburns and scraped knees, of singing around the fire and waking up before dawn to make sure my campers were safe, fed, and cared for. I had built my world around the summer camp where I spent every summer since…
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The world never roots for the stegosaurus. It doesn’t have the sleek, predatory prowess of the Velociraptor, the sheer brute force of the Tyrannosaurus rex, or even the rebellious charm of the Triceratops. If the dinosaur kingdom were a high school, the T. rex would be the star quarterback, the raptors would be the overachieving…
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I drove like hell through the night, the highway stretching endlessly before me, my headlights cutting through the darkness like a blade. The only sound was the hum of the tires on the asphalt and the music playing on my cell phone. I didn’t stop, didn’t slow down. I just kept driving, pushing forward even…
