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“I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.” —Oscar Wilde
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Notes: An Object at Rest.
I love motels. In my adult life, I’ve finally graduated to an income bracket that allows me to upgrade my lodging options so I could, if I wanted, hole up in fancier digs, with niceties like a pool, all-you-can-eat breakfast, as many pillows as one feels comfortable requesting, and the holy-of-holies, a hot tub next…
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To catch a burning breath.
It’s a flashback, these waves on waves of heat, the searing heaviness of the air enough to make me recoil as I step out of the building at the end of my day’s work. In more hapless times, there was no refuge, and my latest skirmish with the mechanical infidelities of my reliable-up-to-lately commuter car…
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The promise of wear.
In the blue morning hours before the household is awake, I am here with a new tool. I picked it up just yesterday, a sleek and slim new machine for writing and making music that replaces the lovely old laptop that was the color of a new penny that I gave to my mother after…
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The rain comes.
I trudged back to the house from the coop with a few eggs in my basket and noted, as I crunched through the swiftly melting snow, that I could find my characteristic treads with their waffle gridwork marking my trudge ahead of me, mixed through with Daisy’s paw prints that have persisted after her by…
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Behind the curtain.
There’s something so delicious about outgrowing things. I think we’re meant, or at least well-trained, to lament those moments when the treasured things we valued lose their gold-plating and are revealed to be something lesser than we thought they were. The eternal becomes the merely good for its time, and we have to think about why,…
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Figure out who you are…
…and then do it on purpose, in the words of the indelible Dolly Parton. I started writing ages ago, it seems, but was a little wayward in figuring out what I am good at doing, largely because the people doing it already remained just outside of my line of sight, often obscured by the (in…
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Slower.
There’s a popular thread that makes the rounds with increasing frequency in which we lament our fragmented, jittery, manipulated attention economy and the nervous lives that we get in that realm, and the antidotes tend to go by neat-sounding titles like “the revenge of analog” or “going analog,” all amusingly laid out in detail on…
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A rare month.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: schoool begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for…