The people across the street will not teach me piano. They told me ‘no’, even after I had put on a clean shirt, combed my hair, and walked all the way over there. I thought it would be like asking for a cup of sugar, like neighbors sometimes do. “Will you teach me piano?” I asked nicely.

Welcome back, everyone! Time to get Ben & Winslow back on the schedule!

On this day, I had reached the limit of my tolerance. It had gone too far and I now felt compelled to express my disdain for the ubiquity of cheese that has spread like a noxious malignancy throughout our culinary culture. Yes. You heard me. CHEESE! Fromage. Parmesan. Pec-er-ino roman-o. Cheddar. Prov-a-lone. Monterey Jack. I spit out these words like profanities.

My brother Jim called to tell me he was about to bid on a 50-acre island in the middle of the Illinois River.

“We want to scale down,” he said. “Do the Thoreau thing. You know—Walden Pond.”

I wrote seven feature length screenplays between the ages of twelve and seventeen. That’s one per year plus an extra one junior year when I got too stoned by myself for the first time. None of these screenplays were ever produced because I both was underage and undertalented (that’s untalented with an extra der). I list them here so my sister’s future children shall be able to see how much cooler their uncle could have been than them.