• Ho, Earthling!

    Local Color

    I’ve always enjoyed the places I’ve lived, at least until the worms began crawling out of the woodwork and infiltrating my brain with messages of malaise, causing me to long for U-Haul boxes and the feel of newspaper-wrapped dishes in my hands (I am very good at packing, ask anyone). But no place I’ve lived — and there have been many — has given me the utter joy I feel these days when I step out my front door and face west and the water and the sky and the islands beyond. Oh no, I take that back. Colorado did that, too. The nightly sight of the Front Range silhouetted…

  • Send in the Clones

    I’ll Have To Keep My Post Titles Short Now

    I wrote this about a week ago: About a year ago, I drove out of one world and into another. I thought then that I had left certain aspects of the old world behind, but I failed to see the invisible trailer attached to my black Honda CR-V, the one carrying the pieces of who I had been. When I started writing here I wrote as if that trailer didn’t move the 3000 miles along with me, as if it was just The New Me here, the one that didn’t feel as if it had walked out of the two-dimensional world of a Mother’s Day card. In the past year…

    Comments Off on I’ll Have To Keep My Post Titles Short Now
  • Ho, Earthling!,  My Brain On Crack

    Sitting Shiva

    They say that caring for the dead body of a loved one is the most intimate act a human can perform. ~~~~ I drove home in silence today. It was two hours of after-airport surreality, the shotgun seat and the back seat now oddly silent after having been so full for the last ten days. I came home to the smell of bacon frying, the love of a man wafting to greet me at the front door, trying to fill the holes in my heart left vacant by the two who now occupied seats 27A and 27B headed back to humid-hell Pennsylvania after ten days of forest trails and waterside…

  • Experiment,  My Brain On Crack

    Boxes

    There’s a box I live in sometimes. My box is just my size. Like a casket. I lie inside it, feeling its smooth wooden sides, feeling safe. Inside my box it’s just me. I was nine when I found the box. Every night I’d lie awake inside it, breathing carefully through the air holes someone had put in it, feeling the rocking motion of the waves. Every night I’d lie inside the box set adrift on the ocean, always landing on an island where there was an evil wizard who did unspeakable things to me. The box lasted at least through fifth grade. That was the year my stomach hurt…