• My Brain On Crack,  Time Machine

    2009 In The Rear-View Mirror

    A year ago I had just moved from a country that didn’t want me to a bare echoey white place hidden under a stifling canopy of tall dark trees. I adore trees, and loved lying in bed looking at green branches, but the bare echoey place had an inner emptiness that rang loudly in my ears. Plus it had weird carpet. In the spring I discovered forested trails and alternate universes. I sat, motionless, sometimes for hours, staring out through a skylight and eventually emerging into a giddy, childlike state, a person who thought lakes were oceans and wondered whether she should be driving real cars. A year ago I…

  • My Brain On Crack

    I Can Smell You

    I was born with superpowers. My birth was heralded by the trumpets of a thousand blowing noses. A thousand throats cried, “Ah!” I can smell you. As you approach and before you even walk past me, I have already decided what you smell like based on your appearance. Dryer sheets in the grocery store, sweat on the hiking trails. I know this with the inner sense we all share. We lift eyes and greet one another kindly, or nonchalantly, or not at all. We continue our separate directions, you one way and me another. After you pass I am bathed by a wafting of your being, an air current bearing…

  • Rants

    People With Big Heads Freak Me Out

    I’ve often wondered why human head size isn’t more standardized. After all, we can be pretty sure that head size isn’t related to brain power, so what other reason would there be not to base natural selection on head size? Getting your head stuck in the neck of your sweater is a serious and life-threatening condition. Smaller heads use fewer resources and are more environmentally sustainable. Big heads need big hats. How many sheep does it take to make the wool in just one big-headed hat? I can imagine that three or four sheep devote themselves full-time to the making of just one hat. This is tricky because sheep are…

  • Write Like You Mean It

    Transition

    A hospital bed stood in the center of the room, once a living room. Now it was a dying room, its walls covered with loved ones’ artifacts and memories. The man in the bed was tiny, shrunken, his body barely visible beneath the sheet that covered him. Only his feet and one hand created small hills in the otherwise nearly-flat landscape. His face was turned to one side and his eyes never left mine. Hold me, they said, I know everything. Hold me. The skin of the man’s face was surprisingly smooth, as if all the cells of his body had ceased their normal work and instead concentrated on making…