A-Bomb–otherwise known as Mr. Pink.
Kennedy gets a good start.
Aaron “flipping out.”
Chin up, girl. Yo. “Not as the giant of their dreams, nor the dwarfs of their fears.”
Thirty painted toes.
Momma.
More swim pictures from the entire 2010 season.
(past imperfect)
A-Bomb–otherwise known as Mr. Pink.
Kennedy gets a good start.
Aaron “flipping out.”
Chin up, girl. Yo. “Not as the giant of their dreams, nor the dwarfs of their fears.”
Thirty painted toes.
Momma.
More swim pictures from the entire 2010 season.
God bless my wife and best friend Holly Huckeba, who yesterday did convince me to manhandle and operate a rented drain auger to open up our clogged laundry drain, even though I was initially very much opposed to this plan, and did complain loudly, and with much bitterness and consternation, and did say that I thought it would never work (though not in an Eeyore voice, nor with any little rain clouds floating over my head).
Indeed, this course of action was MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE than any previous course of action and as a direct result of this drain clearing success, I am feeling VERY BUTCH today.
Huzzah!
This was probably one of the best Huckeba family reunions ever.
The weather was great (once we got used to the suffocating Texas heat and humidity), Aaron and Kennedy managed to form great gender and age constellations with their cousins (some reunions include much bitterness and gnashing of teeth over who will get to hang out with the cool older cousins, but this year all the cousins seemed to be tipping the cool scales), and Texas holds just the right mix of unhealthy but tasty foods (TexMex and BBQ) and exciting but dangerous familial activities (Aaron and I fired a variety of weapons at a shooting range, including an M4, and you can buy inexpensive bottle rockets and packages of exploding mortars called “The 10 Banditos” which includes a warning in the package that reads: FLAMING BALLS OF FIRE WITH REPORT).
What more could you ask for in a reunion?

I’ve got a piece up in Together, a new recovery oriented newspaper for the New York area. I’m revisiting the James Frey boondoggle, but looking at it from a new (I hope) perspective. Check it out: The Millionth Word on “A Million Little Pieces.”
Together appears online and in print. I just got my print copy, and it looks like a gas, not just for people in the recovering community but for anyone interested in a more healthful, contemplative life.
Today is our wedding anniversary, but Holly and I skipped off to Portland for an early celebration a few days ago.
This lovely bud is from the International Rose Test Garden, which is a fun place to stomp around in the City of Roses, especially if it’s June and everything is in bloom and smelling good.
More pictures of the fun.
Jasmine’s party was last week, but she is officially one today. Happy birthday, nieta!
If the pictures on Facebook are any indication, Mom and Dad had a real barn burner of a birthday celebration. I saw miniature horses and pigs, goats and all kinds of fun stuff. I snagged these pictures to post here. Look how happy Tim looks! Carry has the most beautiful smile. Jassy is giving us the peace sign.
Many thanks for sharing the pictures, Carry.
12-16-2005 018, originally uploaded by tim_elhajj.
At Present Tense (past imperfect), we like to honor the veterans.
This is a picture of my son in the engine room of the USCGC Bayberry, from when he was stationed at Port Seattle. I like to think he’s giving the thumbs up to past and present veterans everywhere, especially his wife Carry, who I have heard Tim affectionately refer to as the CO.*
*That’s CO as in Commanding Officer, for all you non-miliatry types out there.

The circumstances of Nick Flynn’s life are grim: abandoned by his father as an infant, haunted by an addiction and the aftermath of a mother who took her own life. But The Ticking is the Bomb isn’t a misery memoir. It’s not a heartwarming tale of redemption. Flynn never casts himself as the victim. Many of the most shocking details about his life are only mentioned in passing. This is a memoir about Flynn’s fears of fatherhood and intimacy, and—somehow—his growing obsession with torture and pain. Under Flynn’s deft hand, the connections between his own personal fears, American fears of terrorist attack, and the fears of torturer and tortured alike seem plain enough, but each is made all the more urgent by the immediacy of the Abu Ghraib scandal, or the infant growing in its mother’s womb.
This is the way to tell a memoir.
He won me as a fan with, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, his first memoir, a meditation on his father and homelessness. Both that book and this one are organized in the same nonlinear fashion. You find little parenthetical dates at the start of some chapters to help you orient the chapter into the overall timeline. It sounds confusing, but he does a good job of establishing and then returning to certain characters and situations, so it works. It feels like an organic approximation of the act of reflection, or maybe what it feels like to sort through a lifetime of memories and try to make sense of it all. As far as narrative goes, this book seems like a series of failed relationships and one lingering, seemingly fragile success. He expresses his growing outrage over American torture, which eventually gives way to a slightly crazed, imploring tenacity. During the months that preceded the invasion of Iraq, I can remember arguing for peace with the same sort of growing intensity. In the end—watching the shock and awe on the network news—I remember feeling angry and powerless, totally wrung out. I remember thinking that I had to stop arguing, that I risked turning into some sort of irrational crank.
Maybe that’s what it takes.

Brevity is another good venue for nonfiction writers.
Essays published on Brevity are 750 words or less. Flash nonfiction, a twist on flash fiction, which Wikipedia tells me has been popular for about twenty or more years, meaning it’s a form that’s really come into its own with the advent of the Web and (presumably) online journals. You won’t find too many journals devoted entirely to nonfiction, and fewer still are nonfiction journals that impose a word count on essays. I can think of only Brevity.
Brevity also has a blog, which is a good place to read about publishing opportunities for nonfiction writers, the latest nonfiction furor or book, and—best of all—brief blog posts from authors who appear in the latest issue of Brevity magazine. These author posts are my favorites, offering insight or commentary on some aspect of the published story—think of it as an author reading in print.
Dinty Moore (Between Panic and Desire and The Accidental Buddhist
) is Brevity’s editor. Warm, generous, smart, Dinty has published some of my pieces, turned some other pieces down, and even helped me with my childhood memoir project, which I’m still hammering away on. He’s a great guy.