An older man wearing a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap was near me on the bus, and his hands were shaking a little. He was singing: "Precious memories, how they linger/ How they ever flood my soul." The girl wearing the pink thong touched my hand and whispered in my ear. "Kind of like being in church, ain't it?"
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A few days ago, for the first time in probably decades, I started thinking of Carl and Pearl Butler. Would they be on YouTube? Sure enough, there they were in their flashy Country music suits singing “Don’t Let Me Cross Over,” their only No. 1 hit, released in 1963.

I’ve certainly made strides in my personal life to consume less and recycle more. But lately — in complete opposition to the elation I feel seeing gas-guzzling SUVs replaced by energy efficient cars — a strange sadness creeps into my heart when I think about a world without paper.
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Somehow, I felt like I needed to pay my last respects, so I went to Bob’s funeral last Wednesday in Price Hill. I can’t exactly remember how we met, probably through a friend of a friend, but it was in the early 1990s. Throughout the years, we always stayed in touch, but I would often ask myself why.
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A couple of weeks ago I was sitting with Tom Wolfe outside his Tom’s Pot Pies restaurant near the corner of Court and Vine streets downtown, and he suddenly pointed his long arm like a basketball center about to dunk. “That’s the dwarf,” he said dramatically, his eyebrows pointed for emphasis.

It was mid-afternoon, and before going through a backlog of e-mails I decided to go to my real mail box and check my real mail. This is usually a somber experience. What fun is it to look through bills, advertisements and junk? This time, though, something got my attention. A blue envelope was in the stack of mail, and my address was handwritten on it.
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I was half asleep on the couch the other night when something struck me: I’m the human equivalent of a soft-serve “twist” cone. I jumped slightly at this realization — nothing makes me sit bolt upright, mind you. I’m a twist cone: a safe mix of vanilla and chocolate.
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Julie: Breakups during this age of cell phones and text messages seem to be so challenging, trying to get away from "it." I'm usually one second away from getting this urge to send a text, avoiding painful conversations, just to make sure that the stupid one will at least think about me for a minute. And reconsider? Larry: Julie's young. I'm not.
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Not long ago, I finished reading The Story of Joe Gould as told by Joseph Mitchell, a columnist at The New Yorker magazine from the 1930s until the mid-’60s. Living solely off his friends’ contributions to “The Joe Gould Fund,” he spent his days as an eccentric, drinking and interacting with the city’s pop society of the time.
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A few weeks ago, my friend Julie and I were walking the sidewalks of downtown and decided to take a No. 1 bus to Mount Adams. It was a nice spring afternoon, and we wanted to take in the sights up on the hill. While walking in Mount Adams, I couldn’t help but notice all the cars parked on the hilly streets.
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