Gabby Star married my Grandpappy when he was a body-building swarthy hunk of a man and she had a Dolly Parton wig and waist. Gabriella Stella was Gabby Star’s given name but she preferred the anglicized Star lest someone miss the glorious implications of her naming. And Gabby to balance the glory with accessibility. And never Grandma, Nana, nothing to suggest she had lived long enough to see two generations birthed. Gabby Star preferred to be called nothing but Gabby Star. Unless it was a deep bass Baby from hunky Grandpappy across the room. That seemed permissible.

When I first moved to NYC in 2010, I arrived without a job. I was, of course, the trailing spouse as my wife had arrived to Manhattan with a lucrative banking job downtown. Every day, I would wake up late, shower and eat breakfast, and then walk two blocks up the street to my favorite coffee shop in all of New York, a yellow and brown facaded Italian cafe which no longer exists called SiCafe. It was mostly frequented by affluent Upper East Side folks and college students (Hunter College was located just a block away). With my laptop in hand, I’d order my standard cappuccino and take my spot near the picture window in front. Then I would begin searching for jobs online. One particular day, I found myself becoming very frustrated over my fruitless job search, and so I penned the following:    

What if being unemployed held some special power?

The Global Burden of Disease: A Comprehensive Assessment of Mortality and Disability from Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors in 1990 and Projected to 2020 states that OCD, the anxiety disorder which I have, is the tenth most disabling disorder worldwide. This statistic got me thinking. First, I didn’t know that there was a ranking system. Since when was this a competition? Who is keeping stats for this, and how? Do people place bets on this? Is there an underground betting scene for mental illnesses that I don’t know about?

So you want to write a novel! Good for you! There’s no profession except writing that pays less than McDonald’s. Since you may be eating a lot from the Golden Arches, this is a brave decision. 

Amongst the myriad of questions posed by the great minds of history, many have been answered satisfactorily, and many others pursued to an incomplete end. Yet it is the rare question that is posed in the public square but never followed up at all. And today we re-ask just such a question, a problem that concerned men in a former era, yet which seems to have passed out of the consciousness of the generations since. Asked mid-century man perceptively: “Who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop?”