brendan halpin

Last time I wrote about Boston’s charter schools being in trouble, I theorized that the people who had bad experiences as charter school students twenty-five years ago were probably not going to send their kids to these schools.

That’s part of the picture. But with City on a Hill now set to close at the end of the school year and the Boston Globe blaming a drop in the school-age population (which of course affects all schools equally and is therefore a nonsensical explanation for one school’s problems), I think it’s an appropriate time to bring up another problem that charter schools, and especially City on a Hill, have.

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I went to my first metal show last night! Well, I guess it was the second if you count that year that Ozzfest was free.

I grew up listening to punk, which is sort of metal-adjacent, but the mainstream conquered punk in 1991, whereas the more extreme versions of metal remain pretty stubbornly un-commercial. I mean, I assume some of these bands make a living making their art, but nobody’s getting rich making black metal.

I’m drawn to art that gathers in misfits, as punk did when I was a kid, and so I have been slowly working my way into metal. I like the theatricality and the musicianship, but I’d still consider myself an outsider to the scene. (I mean, also I’m old as fuck, so). So this is pretty much going to be an outsider’s view of a metal show. Which means I don’t know all the proper names of the sub-sub-sub genres, for one thing, so don’t yell at me about that. Okay, off we go!

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I’ve started my own reading challenge! I call it “read all the books you’ve picked up on the street or from little free libraries or from book sales or gifts before you read anything else!” Catchy, right?

First up is a book I think I got on the street when someone was moving or just cleaning out their bookshelves. It’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector by Mick Brown.

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Well, the last of my short stories I still had out on submission finally got rejected. (From Mystery Tribune, which is a good publication that puts out a gorgeous physical magazine, and which I recommend despite this stunning lapse in editorial judgment.)

So nothing I’ve written in the last ten years is now part of the publishing industrial complex, and I’m honestly quite relieved. I had no idea what a toll the constant cycle of submission and rejection was taking on me until I stopped.

Anyway, this is a nice little story that’s free of bloodshed and gore. It’s really about a friendship. I wrote it in part because I missed my friend Liz who died in 2009. We aren’t the characters in this story, and this friendship isn’t our friendship, so I can’t really explain how writing this helped me with missing her. But it did.

The only content warnings this time out are for addiction. Both main characters are struggling with sobriety.

Enjoy!

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I’ve been seeing a lot of despair out there on the internet recently. I get it—the rise of fascism worldwide is both scary and depressing. But I want to give you some reasons to be hopeful. (Don’t worry! I’m sure my regular snark and sarcasm will be back soon!)

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As a former theater kid, I have a lifelong love of the theater and a sense of ongoing sadness that most theater is inaccessible to most people. I mean, yeah, there are often cheap student tickets available (but, of course, 50% of people in the USA don’t attend 4-year colleges), and if you jump on something quickly, you can sometimes find a ticket for 30 or 40 bucks, but for most professional performances in the Boston area, anyway, you’re looking at between 75 and 150 bucks per ticket.

So I’m always interested in efforts to make theater more accessible. I recently saw The Interrobangers, by M. Sloth Levine at the Boston Public Library. Tickets were pay-what-you-want, and, as a result of this (as well as the subject matter, probably), the crowd skewed much younger than a typical theater performance.

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I had never seen any of the previous seasons before watching season one, so instead of measuring season 4 against season 1, I’m going to do the opposite.

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Apart from a brief period, I’ve been broke, to a greater or lesser degree, for most of my life. (I’m making a distinction between broke and poor here, which I’ll explain below.) It’s embarrassing to be broke. To get your card declined at the store. To admit to people you know that you can’t really afford to do or buy something. To take loans and handouts from friends and family when you’re having a hard time.

All this stuff feels shameful. But it shouldn’t, for two reasons.

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I’m sure you can absorb this from other disciplines, but here’s an important lesson I got from studying literature, in particular poetry: the part that doesn’t make sense is what makes it make sense.

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Now, for those who don’t know me, I’ve been an English/Writing teacher in some form or another for most of the last 30 years. Just gotta establish those bona fides because I know teachers won’t listen to anyone who’s not a teacher. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing! I went to enough “professional development” meetings led by consultants who had never set foot in a classroom to be extremely skeptical of non-teacher takes on teaching.)

Okay, let’s start with a quiz. Which one of these is an error?

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