A bored boy disappears into the racks of a Main Street institution, where jungle cats, the Wild West, and a chance encounter with a local legend turn an ordinary shopping trip into something worth remembering.
Monthly Archives: August 2026
Dolly
A boyhood punchline became a lifelong lesson in music, empathy, labels, and learning to see the person who had been there all along.
Friday Night Atari
A Friday night in Syracuse, 1983. Pitfall gives way to Robot Tank, and a ten-year-old boy discovers a new dimension just before his own world is about to change.
The Ghosts of Skaneateles
A few notes from an old AM radio send me backward through three generations and seventy years of family history on the shores of Skaneateles Lake. From a frightened boy on a dock in 1976, to my parents in 1968, to a grandfather I never met in 1956, the ghosts of the lake were there all along.
Starboy
A forbidden basement room. A glowing stereo. An older sister with something to share. One side of 2112 later, music would never sound the same.
The Den
Hidden behind a forgotten hallway lies a perfectly preserved den where the television still glows, the radio still crackles, and the forgotten interstitials of Saturday morning patiently wait to be discovered once again. The Den is an exploration of memory not as an archive, but as a living place where the overlooked moments of childhood quietly shaped who we became.
Mannino Acid 