After a morning of grinning and bearing it – or, if you prefer, grabbing our ankles and saying ‘thank you sir may I have another!?’ – by putting up with fake Southern hospitality, we swung through Tupelo, Mississippi, on the way to Alabama. If you know your history of The King, you’ll know that Elvis [...]

Let me start with a disclaimer: Pedophilia is a horrible thing.
Now that I have your attention, let me continue by saying that sitting in an empty parking lot between the hours of 10 and 11 p.m. with the windows of your car open – while people come out of neighboring stores to stare at you [...]

I was driving out of New Orleans today when my boss asked me a question.
‘What did you think of Mr. Rob?’ he said, referring to the man he had just interviewed and I had just photographed.
I paused for a minute before answering, glancing at the scenery. Flashing past were the fallen shells of strip malls, [...]

Let’s talk about Oktoberfest, Elysian Fields, irony and Texas.
There is a certain purity about Oktoberfest, a time when leaves are changing colors, when the air is crisp and cool, when people are gathering to drink metric ass-tons of beer. There are necessary elements have a full rendition of this Munich festival, like sausages, schnitzel, funny [...]

A Discussion With An Anthropomorphized Best Western In McPherson, Kansas: An Adapted Account of Actual Happenings When A Hotel Room Is Infested With Flies and Front-Desk Personnel Are Strangely Unconcerned.
A BEST WESTERN HOTEL is standing on the side of a desolate strip mall in small-town Kansas. NICK pulls up in a white Buick LaCrosse.
Nick: How’s [...]

The official name of my cross-country trip – since my office is footing the bill and I’m technically working – is the ‘True Tales Tour.’ Today, however, I commandeered the driver’s seat and launched my own initiative, the ‘True Tacky Tour.’
Apparently the state of Kansas is a bit wanting for things to do. Last night, [...]

On A Preponderance Of Beautiful Scenery, Lost Highway And Not Dying.
I’ve never finished watching David Lynch’s Lost Highway, but one image of the movie has always stayed with me: Bill Pullman is driving along, well, a highway, and the only source of illumination is his headlights pointed ten degrees down from the horizontal, hitting nothing [...]

For the first time in more than a week, I slept for nearly eight hours. It was beautiful. After yesterday’s grueling schedule, I’m glad we had some respite from the interview/photo shoot grind.
We spent the early afternoon looking for laser-cut-metal artwork – not exactly my idea of a decorating scheme, but hey – and ended [...]

Unfortunately for me, I’m in the middle of the granola, hippie-shite, out-of-civilization part of my trip. The western border of Idaho is full of sleepy towns like Cottonwood (population: 944) and rocky crags and evergreen forests … before giving way to boring-ass potato fields. And my Treo doesn’t work in the middle of nowhere, so [...]

I learned – for the fifth or so time – why I don’t need to go to casinos.
There’s a line in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Raoul Duke hits the gambling floor somewhere in the 2-5 a.m. range and describes the men sitting at the blackjack tables as ‘caricatures of used-car salesmen from [...]

I went to bed last night feeling like an outsider: I had just closed the curtains on a gay-bondage photo shoot taking place in the apartment building across the alley, and I was treated to an endless parade of sirens and cries and yells and a cacophony of other drag-queen noises from street level.
I woke [...]

The cabbie that picked me up at 5:05 a.m. next to Wrigley Field provided the best (accidental) summary of my cross-country trip thus far:
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Moving out?”
I could see why he would ask me that – here I was, bleary-eyed and struggling down the middle of the street under the weight [...]

I was about to say ‘it’s becoming extraordinarily difficult to watch soccer matches on television,’ but that’s not the case at all. Rather, it’s still difficult to watch soccer matches on television.
Take the opening match of the U.S. national team this World Cup. I called a local bar and asked a simple question: ‘Hey, are [...]

Some people want a bodyguard. Others want a personal servant. After some deliberation, I’ve decided I’d like to hire a 60-year-old Brooklyn Jew as my assistant.
We started a round of golf on Sunday morning with three of us, so the course added a fourth to round out the group. We had the pleasure of meeting [...]