HeyJaredThe Girl Can't Help It
I've needed to write stuff down all of my life. What you'll find here is a little bit of journalism thrown against life experience with a heaping dose of imagination and feeling. Please subscribe to support my efforts.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 26, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 18, 2026
Latest issues
Nor’easter (opens the original)
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This post is about “The Great 1992 Nor’easter,” as Wikipedia recently referred to it, as I experienced it. All of these things happened on December 10th and 11th, 1992 .….except I can’t remember if they happened on the same day. Since we are now in the midst of “The Much Greater 2026 Nor’easter,” which is sure to depose its predecessor, I thought it would be interesting to compare notes.As someone on the Plymouth, Massachusetts Facebook page just snarked “Has anybody seen Jim Cantore? No? Then w
The Hungry EYE (opens the original)
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It has been a month and some weeks since I posted on Substack what I thought of quite innocently as one fan’s reaction to the untimely death of Glen Hansard on July 29. The post, quite literally, blew up. Sent to 124 subscribers of The Girl Can’t Help It, my Glenn Hansard piece ultimately garnered 4,800 views and generated nearly as many negative comments as positive ones. It is time for me to write a post-mortem (sic). In other words, I need to get out from under all of the mixed signals.<
The Best Little Band You Never Heard Of (opens the original)
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My earliest memory of rock n’ roll - besides seeing The Beatles on TV on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 - has to be from the spring of 1964, in the backyard of my family home in Huntington, New York. Subscribe nowI am 7 years old and have recently acquired a little “suitcase” record player for 45s made by Emerson. I think it was gray and had a felt turntable. That day my capable Dad had found a long extension cord so that the record player could be plugged into an outlet in the ki
Rotational (opens the original)
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July 23rd was supposed to be the day that the planet Mercury ended its latest episode of “going retrograde,” a bit of planetary devilry that astrologists blame for all kinds of mayhem, including lapses in communication, travel mixups, technology glitches and difficulty in decision-making.It is not that the planet reverses itself, but an optical illusion seen from Earth as Earth passes the faster moving Mercury in rotation around the sun. Mercury completes the cycle in 88 days, so as Earth draws
Glen Hansard (opens the original)
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By now, everyone with a beating heart has learned the awful news that Glen Hansard - the abundantly talented singer-songwriter, sometime actor (The Commitments 1991; Once 2006), founder and leader of The Frames, busker extraordinaire, Oscar winning composer, philanthropist and just plain enormously likeable guy - died in a tragic motorcycle accident on July 29, 2026 in Dublin. Hansard was 56 years old. His funeral is tomorrow.The Girl Can’t Help It is reader-supported on Subs
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