The other day I was thinking about "Big Johnson" t-shirts. These were shirts that featured stupid dick jokes and caricatures of big breasted women. They were popular in the 1990s before we had social media as an outlet on which college students could show their...
Fourth grade was a bad year for me. I went from the loving embrace of Mrs. Minnis, a woman who defended my left-handedness by loudly telling everyone in class that her husband, an artist, was also left-handed, to the cold-fish grip of Mrs. Mackrel. Honestly, I don't...
When I was a child we did not know our teachers' first names. A better part of the school year was spent trying to find out your teacher's name and other personal information. If you came up with intel about a teacher's family you could count on good lunch trades for...
A story made the rounds in Chicago recently about a high school senior who wore a shirt with a picture of an AK-47 on it. The school principal felt that the shirt violated the dress code against "disruptive clothing" and asked the boy to turn it inside out or face a...
One hundred years ago, or maybe it was fourteen, or maybe yesterday I'm not sure which, I bought these boots. I had moved to Chicago on a whim, and then seven years later fled the city in what I now know was a way-too-early mid-life crisis. I left a pre-bust 1990s...
The "Angry White Guy" is a stock figure in feminist writing. This is a man who rails at the world for changing and taking away his privilege and blames it all on women and minorities. Last month I "met" AWG and similar to the time that I was called a racist and...