Dear Sir or Madam: Recently, my quality of life took a rather abrupt downswing when I was unexpectedly required to accompany my mother on one of her weekly visits to the chiropractor. Some undoubtedly banal meeting…
The past few months here in Milledgeville, Georgia, have been unseasonably warm, even for this part of the world. I’ve noticed two immediate results. One is a bumper crop of enormous flying German cockroaches (“palmetto bugs”)…
Here’s what I know about our people: Your dad is dead and has been since well before the Apocalypse. It’s a shame you won’t remember him. Sometimes I like to entertain myself with the idea that…
My dad just served me a weather post, in the most improbable way. We’d just woken up and were sitting at my kitchen table, in my fifth-floor walk-up, looking out my window over the flats of central…
A week ago, Ben Lerner won the Believer Book Award for his debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, beating out fellow Trop-approved author Jesse Ball. Ostensibly, Leaving the Atocha Station is a curious choice. It spurns…
Dear Readers, Today ends Trop’s first week of existence, so I thought it’d be a good time to explain a few things. Let’s start with logistics. We’re going to offer five full-length posts per week—one per…
And females are expected to be nice.
I was in Connecticut with my brother Chris, standing in the rain outside a movie theater, waiting to see a sneak preview of The Avengers. But I wasn’t talking to Chris. I was on the phone, debating…
Welcome to our home, Acorn Hill. Acorn Hill was built for a Great Man nearly two hundred years ago. Most people see the house as a monument to him; its columns uphold his legacy, the tall…
Back in the days when I was strong enough to read depressing literature, I read The Drowned and the Saved. The author claimed that in the concentration camps the nice people with him died, so if…
Yesterday, Evan wrote that he sympathized with the challenge facing me in this task of writing creatively about the weather from a place with a climate as famously uneventful as Los Angeles’s: here, we barely have…
The two and a half acres of Stevens Square Park are home to a few dozen oaks well over a century old, a pergola, a playground, a basketball hoop, a pump-handled well—also almost a century old—and,…
It’s been almost fourteen months now. So many are dead. I won’t go on and on here about how numb and weepy this makes me. But being completely dead in the old-fashioned sense is preferable to…
Five years ago, whenever a friend asked me why I’d given up on LA, it was obvious where the clichés ended and an actual opinion began: I hated the people, the prices, the traffic, the weather—…
Dear Reader, This legend is a key to the formatting used throughout to indicate topics that will be expanded in future columns, and that those terms mean something more than how they appear: Underlined = vestigial racial…
I moved out of our old house, the one we lived in when you left America. I’m in that one I liked better at the end of our block. It’s right on Lake Michigan, and has…
Totally quiet in the office today. No real patients, just more zombies begging for freebies. I keep trying to explain that if you aren’t alive, you don’t have a life force, and therefore you don’t need…