Lucas J. Draeger
Banish me to a dark corner, chain me to a keyboard, and I will gladly be a word slave. I'd sit there all day, with only an occasional demand for a coffee break.
I'm a would-be (wanna be) author, middle aged, fairly repressed, but extremely BLESSED with an amazing wife and two brilliant boys.
For several years, I've been haunted by images of the starving, drug addicted, victimized teens of the streets. I write about them a lot.
Plates they will shiftHouses will shakeFences will driftWe will awakeOnly to findNothing’s the same. Home is a Fire – Death Cab For Cutie It was cloudy yesterday, the first cloudy day in nearly a week. Any time there’s a stretch of several sunny days in a row, I […]
“I get high and I get lowOh, but that’s the wayThese things go” Black Water, Reuben and the Dark I don’t get insomnia like I used to. That’s like an alcoholic saying he doesn’t drink like he used to. The miracle of AA might do for an alcoholic […]
I suffered a sneeze attack while sitting in the stands at my son’s swim meet this past weekend. The “stands” were not the metal bleachers you’re likely envisioning. Instead, they were rows of concrete steps, draped in some of the filthiest, threadbare carpeting I’ve seen in a long […]
“Churches and trains, they all look the same to me now.” Amsterdam, Gregory Alan Isakov A months old conversation I had with a friend keeps replaying in my mind. “Teenagers have this thing they like to say, ‘It’s all just movies.’” It was uttered with great concern, a […]
Heaven is real. I’ve been there, and I hope to go again. Most likely, you’ve been to heaven as well. The thing about heaven is, as soon as you use a word to refer to it, the image slips away like vapor. In fact, by using the pronoun […]
I appreciate the method of the Stoics, their non-dualistic way of navigating life with the reverberating mantra, Everything is perfect. Everything is as it should be. This is all there is. It isn’t easy to maintain such a mindset for very long; perhaps it’s impossible. Suffer one lousy […]
“Why’s that girl crying? That’s not the way you want to be when you’re about to race!” To be honest, I understood exactly why the young lady two lanes down from me was crying. She was merely expressing the emotion I’ve been picking up from many of the […]
Forgive me for doing this out of order. Narratives ought to start with a What or perhaps a Why, but I’m going to start by by telling you of the Where. I’m going to tell you Where I am right now, because it’s my story and I can […]
Though his mind is not for rent, don’t put him down as arrogant. He reserves the quiet defense riding out the day’s events. The river. Tom Sawyer – Rush I didn’t learn of the place called Birthday Town from google, and I didn’t buy the tickets I gifted […]
The following is a collaborative effort between myself and my ten-year-old son. The initial concept was his. He was two pages in when he said he’d written himself into a corner. I was impressed with what he’d come up with and didn’t want to see the story wasted, […]