Welcome to the Open Mike Blog where author and comic Mike Carlon shares reflections on life, liberty, and the pursuit of laughter. Sometimes the joke is on him.
Accepting others for who they are and not for who we want them to be
This morning I laughed harder than I have in a very long time. I also cried a bit too. My brother Jimmy came over to help me pick up some furniture that we were giving him. I opened the bilco doors in my basement and a family of spiders scampered around and mamma...
Paddy GoGo
He may have been born at just under three pounds, but you'd never know it. Even when he was in the NICU, Patrick was always on the go, squirming away in his incubator. It earned him the nickname Squirm Worm from one of his nurses, Krista (also a golfer). Ever since...
And then there was one
Something strange happens when you go from a house bustling with energy and noise to a quiet one. It feels weird, as if something is wrong. Even the dogs are picking up on it because they have been extra mopey lately. This past Thursday, we moved Gracie "G-Money"...
A New Chapter
It's fitting that the first of our triplets to come home from the hospital after being born 9 weeks early is the first to exit the nest and head to college. Today we moved Maggie in to her dorm at the University of Connecticut, which holds a special place in my heart...
School Boy Heart
In their haste to go swimming at a friend’s house today, my three favorite children left the kitchen a complete mess; apparently there’s nothing as scary to my kids than a clean dishwasher. I have a lot of work to do today but, since I have a Ph.D. in procrastination,...
Fatman and the Boy Blunder
CHalloween was one of my favorite holidays as a kid. I loved the fact that, for one day out of the year, I could pretend to be someone else. It's not that I didn't like who I was, but the idea that you could put on a mask and a cape and turn yourself into your...
The Daily Smile Day 7—Holy Thursday
If we were in ordinary time (my fellow Catholics will see what I did there), tonight we'd be gathering as a community and celebrating mass for Holy Thursday, in which we recount The Last Supper. I know, it's a pretty heavy topic for something called The Daily Smile,...
The Daily Smile Day 5: Columbo
There have been many game changers in the police procedural genre. I remember when NYPD Blue debuted and it was so "edgy," what with the foul language and nudity that was so racy for network TV. Law and Order and its ripped from the headlines take on plot lines...
The Daily Smile Day 4: The Love Boat
I have a confession to make, I've never been on a cruise. When I lived in Florida, my mother and father took my older brother and sister on a cruise on a ship called The Flavia. Jimmy and I didn't care because we were afraid of anything that went on the open seas....