When we are young, we look forward to holidays with unbridled excitement because they are so full of possibility. But as we age, we turn our attention to the past, to memories of a life already spent. We wax poetic about ancient meals, and conversations with people no longer living.…
Magical Thinking In America: Taco Trucks, Drag Queens, Baseball And Love
An experimental exercise in ideas and language. When you buy a ticket to the circus, you expect to see some crazy shit, but what you don’t expect is for the circus to burst into your living room and start getting it on right in front of you. There is nothing…
My Fighting Weight In Scarves
I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to a point where I think I look better unclothed than I do clothed. For all intents and purposes that ship has sailed and probably didn’t set off anytime recently either. It was probably somewhere around my mid-twenties and even then I…
Daylight Fading
Autumn is a smell: woodsmoke, decaying leaves, and cinnamon. It’s a color palette too: oranges, reds, and browns. The color of the earth on fire. The air has an entirely different quality, with a crisp snap in your nose and the way the low light glows now rather than shimmers,…
Ahhh, That’s Better
It’s a story that’s been told and told again in our family. I think we tell it because it so accurately reflects who we are as a people in a way that trying to describe our little clan could never do. It’s a symbol of our love, arrogance, ego and…
I Don’t Have To Understand Jazz
“Jazz is rhythm and meaning.” — Henri Matisse The French painter Henri Matisse once said, “I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” This is how I feel when I try to understand jazz, and to be clear, I do not understand jazz. This is not to…
I Had Something To Say But I’ve Forgotten What It Was
It has taken me the better part of half a century to learn that I am not a good public speaker. This is not due to a fear of getting on stage, or speaking to large groups of people, but a realization that my mind does not like to perform…
A Bear Of Very Little Brain
My issue with authority began at an early age. I realized early on that adults were not only infallible, but often incompetent as well. This can be a scary thing to learn as a child I suppose, but I was not deterred. I just assumed I would need to do…
The Crick Be Damned
Fifty-two is not that old really, even though I am now decidedly middle-aged, but since we raised our kids when I was especially young, it’s hard for me to imagine raising a child today. If I had a deficit of patience back then, which I most certainly did, I have…
Cutting Bait
I wasn’t there the morning they found old Bill Yawley with a knife in his chest at the fish camp, but you can be sure I heard all about it when I got back. Story went, and this was from several reliable sources, someone shoved a filet knife straight into…