New Book Is Now Available on Amazon

My new book, Such Is Life in Vacationland, is now available as a paperback or an ebook from Amazon. It is a collection of selected "Field Notes" columns and new content related to my formative years growing up on the Lake Erie coast of Ohio.

The book is FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers and priced at $12 for the paperback and $6 for the ebook. A preview of the first three chapters is also available.

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FIELD NOTES: Random Cohabitation

In July of 1980, I received an invitation in the mail. It was from someone named Rod Smith, who introduced himself as my residence hall advisor for the upcoming fall quarter at Ohio University. He invited me to a "small get-together" at his house in Perrysburg for the incoming first-year students on his floor. I'll give Rod credit for trying, but I was the only person on that floor within reasonable driving distance, and I wasn't going to miss a night of work to attend his party. In retrospect, that might have been shortsighted of me. Except for a couple of high-school buddies who roomed together, no one on the first floor of James Hall that September had met or even communicated with anyone else until we showed up a day or two before classes. Apparently, that's not how it's done these days. I stumbled across a lengthy article from the Ohio University student newspaper, The Post, detailing how to go about selecting and vetting a roommate through social media....

FRIDAY MATINEE: Midnight Mass (🍺🍺🍺🍺)

I held off writing this review until I had seen all seven episodes of the new Netflix limited series “Midnight Mass.” I’ve been burned in the past by shows that start out well and then devolve into silliness as they progress. While “Mass" doesn’t completely stick the landing, I think even the East German judge would give it a solid 9. Taken as a whole, I think it is as effective a piece of horror as the combined “It” movies from a few years ago, and right on par with “Hereditary” and “Midsommar.” The story revolves around a man returning to his childhood island home after a prison stay for a drunk driving accident that killed a teen girl. Coincidentally, it is the same day the island’s beloved elderly priest, Monsignor Pruitt is supposed to return from a trip to the Holy Land. Unfortunately, the priest has taken ill and is being treated on the mainland. A temporary priest arrives to take his place. The story takes a little while to get going, and anyone who’s familiar with t...

FIELD NOTES: A Lesson From The Cubby

There is a shelf, it's a cubby really, in our walk-in closet where I keep my everyday carry items; watch, change, wallet, pen, pocket knife, keys, etc. Invariably, when I empty my pockets at night, I dump any receipts, ticket stubs, scribbled notes, and candy wrappers I collected during the day onto that same shelf. Typically, I will gather all those up, sort the keepers and dispose of the trash every couple of weeks. For whatever reason, though, over the past few months, I let the pile grow without culling, and when I took advantage of this rainy weekend past to do some indoor projects, cleaning up that cubby was near the top of the list. As a general rule, I don't wax rhapsodic about cleaning out my closet, but as I was sorting through the debris, which by the nature of gravity and stacking was in roughly chronological order, I had an opportunity to revisit the highlights of what was a relatively normal summer after a couple of pandemic-induced outliers. The t...

John B. Marek

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