This post is part of a short fictional series. It comes with a brief apology about the length. I’m aiming to keep each segment under a thousand words, but, well… yeah… The beginning is here. * * * * * Click. They were gone. The sound seemed to shrivel and disappear beneath the threshold, pulling every other sound with it. There was nothing left but my breathing, and the blank-faced stare of the walls. For a moment, […]
Well, I couldn’t squish this into a single post… I promise it won’t be too many. Welcome to my short foray into serial fiction… * * * * * It was just a small apartment. I don’t know what I had really expected, but not something so patently vacant. It would end here? There was a dinged up coffee table, a faded olive sofa that didn’t match the carpet, a landslide of unsorted mail on […]
However it happened—none can really say. I only know that I was standing in a pasture filled with mirrored boxes, like disco saunas, and that people were lined up in front of them in silent repose. We were like a host of jet-lagged arrivals waiting to get our passports stamped—or our eyes examined, or our opinion surveyed, or our future turned upside down and shaken out, its contents inspected for contraband bits of the past. […]
My unfolding as a being has undergone a few prompt jumps in self-expression. In the 1990 time frame I went from viewing rock music as one of the influences most likely to lead to my destruction– in the same category as cigarettes, underage drinking, and not doing your homework– to buying Nirvana’s record Nevermind. And feeling somehow holy about it. It was auspicious. The lightning I had anticipated failed to strike. It takes all of thirty […]
Every once in a while reality gets in a mood. Wants to bust up the ice. Show us our options. Get the lead out. Crumple up history into a ball. Rubs its hands together. Blows on the dice. Not for luck. Oh no. The devoted– the ones alone in the gym before daylight about to shoot their five hundred free throws– they do the same. Twirl the world in their hands. Breathe deep. Visualize it. […]
Several posts I read this week raised a similar question about the New: what would it look like to you? What would it feel like? Who would we be? I wrote in one response that it seemed to me we would trust one another and all that is around us— meaning the heart of the world itself—in a very deep way. Then I went out and lived the type of week that made my musings […]
The limited predictive intelligence of nuance can sometimes permit the obfuscation of the glaringly obvious. Said another way: forecasts predicated on the data typically accrued during the life span of a single human being are known to be astoundingly flawed. This may explain why Hafiz and Rumi stare at me like a pair of dispassionate fieldstones on the verge of sprouting horns when I wax extemporaneously about the day’s events— as if my mouth is moving, […]
The place itself, the physical structure, was built to produce a return. It’s all right angles and flashing from a tube, inoperable windows, and two-tone exterior panels of artificial masonry. But it’s where we do it. Each morning we drive in from all points of the compass to the center, gathering together as befits us, to produce work. That’s the key, really. To produce work. To offer something up. The flimsy walls don’t matter. The […]
This writing has undone me, peeled away my knowing and my nonsense, and led me way out way out from the edge to where there are no shadows, to where the clear light is visible in every direction, to where the wind is always scented by the horizon– in hues of timber and sunlight, in copal, cedar, and jasmine. Some days flowers fall from the sky, but no matter. What would it matter? I remember […]
The sleek apparatus we call progress has failed us. The signs are all around, if we but dare heed them. I’m very clear, for instance, that the curdling of country lanes into frost-heaved mogul courses should be a bygone phenomenon. You shouldn’t be forced to drink the day’s first cup of coffee while your kidneys are undergoing paratrooper training. Similarly, had progress been successful, tests of the Emergency Broadcast System would have been moot by […]
Embracing Forever 