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The Kinship of Strangers: When DNA Reveals What Identity Cannot Accept

Some truths arrive uninvited. They come in the mail, in the form of a cardboard box containing a plastic tube, a prepaid envelope, and instructions for depositing saliva. Six weeks later, they return as a percentage breakdown, a haplogroup designation, a list of genetic relatives you never knew existed. The Kinship of Strangers, the third novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when those percentages contradict everything you were raised to believe about who you are and who belongs to your people.

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The Inheritance: When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot

Some secrets do not stay buried. They write themselves into blood and bone. They pass from grandmother to mother to daughter through mechanisms we are only beginning to understand. The Inheritance, the second novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when a scientist trained to study transgenerational trauma in laboratory mice discovers that the patterns she has been mapping exist in her own DNA.

The Inheritance: A Fractional Fiction Novel

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As Holidays Fade, Culture Disappears

As we step into, and away from, malleable malfeasance, we cannot but help to linger on what is, and what has been lost. In the United States, we have cheapened our culture with vulgarity, and purposeful misfortune, and cunning, evil, unrest. We have also abandoned a right celebration of our most beloved holidays.

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My 2016 Presidential Campaign

As we stretch into 2016, the politics of our nation cannot be ignored for their short-fingered vulgarity and the ultimate distress of who we’ve become as a teenaged nation. I’m missing the human connection in the race for the White House and so I wrote a little speech I would love to give to my supporters who have asked me to run — not really, but in my blogger mind — for the presidency.

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When Your Third Place Does Not Want You: Elderly Entitlement and Fighting the New Old Korean Queens Gang

I’ve been following an ongoing saga in the New York Times concerning a local McDonald’s restaurant in Queens and how elderly Koreans in the neighborhood have taken over the place as their community hub.

This new, “old,” gang doesn’t really buy anything and they stay all day long taking up space and not making any money for the business.  There’s a Senior Citizen Community Center nearby, with van service for those who cannot walk that far, but the retired don’t want to go there because it’s in a Church basement.

The one thing you take away from reading about this ongoing conflict between elder entitlement and the business needs of McDonald’s is that the old people — like the Millennials behind them — believe they have the freedom and the right to sit wherever they want, and linger as long as they wish, with no repercussion whatsoever. Asking them to leave to make room for others is a cultural slap in the face that will not be tolerated.

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