There are times when I want to flee into the wilderness to a place with no cell or internet service and stay there. This is one of them. There are also times where I try for a mood lift, maybe by drawing some cartoons skewering tone-deaf politicians. This is not [...]
How's everyone doing? Are you managing to find the nuggets of good stuff hidden in this year's hazardous waste dump? I've picked up my rapidograph pens again and had fun doodling these cartoons, which I give to you in hopes it'll elicit a giggle or two. Please feel free to [...]
Mist, rain, chill, repeat, it’s Juneuary. Mossy roofs, rain gutters leaf-bulged, a smell of drowned earthworms, the slap of agglomerated raindrops under a maple tree, patter like white noise, chuckling drains and scalloped rain-waves on pavement. A ’42 Chevy in a shed, a deep-throated ship’s horn in the Strait. The [...]
We all know the basics because we just saw the video. Two security guards who worked together for years get into an altercation on the street: one is a police officer, white, and the other is a man, black. Four officers total, the black man handcuffed and prone, the white [...]
It always snows here at the end of April, big white drifts of cherry blossoms, like little spirits. Lower branches go first, then uppers, nodding at a teasing sou’easter as masses of pale corollae go slant-petaling down past grizzled treebark. You never see the moment of tremble and separate, you [...]
Once, deep in an Alaskan winter in the abyss of a post-divorce-induced depression, I spent an entire Saturday sitting in the living room of my rented postwar cottage, rocking absentmindedly in a creaky chair, dog in my lap, staring through small frosted windowpanes at feathers of hoarfrost growing outward on [...]
Seven years ago this week I was on an island off the coast of New Zealand, walking twice a day up a small steep mountain to care for an abandoned endangered baby parrot in the wild. I talked to it, gave it water, and on the fifth day it ate [...]
…and the patrons immediately realize the danger and leave. I hope whoever says, “May you live in interesting times” is given the job of White House Tweet Control. Or perhaps Consigliere to the Attorney General. I’ll take boring times over these adrenalin-draining times any time. The stench horn of national [...]
In her poem Blackbirds, the poet Julie Cadwallader Staub wrote, "...and when I turned my face upward / I saw a flock of blackbirds / rounding a curve I didn't know was there / and the sound was simply all those wings, all those feathers against air, against gravity..." She asked, [...]
I have avoided writing about overtly political topics in this blog, mostly because it’s divisive and I need space for other aspects of my writing life. Satire is a reliable outlet for frustration, angst, and general world-weariness, but as I try to digest the events of yet another exhausting week [...]