POSTED // Nov 14,2007 - Let’s not beat around the bush here. I am stout. Perhaps “portly” or simply “overweight.” OK, “paunchy,” for the sake of accuracy: There is a bulge at the belt buckle that I suck in when I catch my reflection...

POSTED // Oct 24,2007 - I’m of a certain age where I am more likely to be sitting on the back row at a funeral than reprising the Macarena at a wedding. I’m also old enough to have a cultivated regard for how things ought to be—or, as likely, ought not be—so...

POSTED // Aug 15,2007 - Dave Crossland finished tuning his well-worn Gibson guitar and started into a song from his latest CD. As he did, the French family, who had been sitting on the back row, stood up, made their way to the door and walked out. Crossland stopped. Mugging...

POSTED // Jun 18,2007 - I have spent a lot of time in Sugar House. I was among the throng of kids at the Saturday matinees at the Southeast Theater where a nickel bought a Sugar Daddy which lasted half as long as the movie. A few years later, I watched first-run films there'West...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - The deadline for filing income-tax returns is upon us. By the time I drop mine in the mailbox, my frustration, having raged for a week, will have subsided for another year. Figuring my tax bill is an annual ordeal for me. I don’t so much mind...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - As a student of literature at the University of Utah, I was introduced to James Joyce and the concept of epiphany as he defined it. For him, epiphany was a moment of realization often manifest in an ordinary circumstance. I studied his short stories searching...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - In the battle between the sexes, the time of the winter offensive is at hand. Veterans of past campaigns feel it in their bones as snow whitens the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains. It’s the time of the Christmas tree. The onset of Yuletide hostilities...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Drive south and west in the valley and your aesthetic sense will be numbed by the squat, flat-roofed buildings lining the roads: row upon row of rectangular strip malls unrelieved by either acute angle or sweeping curve. It is as if the building code...