Author Archives

Bill Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

• A thumbnail of a person

  By Bill Pearse on July 8, 2015 • ( 8 )

  

  The playground is empty though it’s the middle of the day, the middle of the summer, with laminated signs on stakes warning the slides are very hot from the sun. It’s like the heat made everyone disappear, until two teenaged… Read More ›

• You’ve got to earn the right to be wrong

  By Bill Pearse on July 7, 2015 • ( 17 )

  

  The woman in the pizza shop carries her kid on her hip like it’s some growth, a Mini-Me, an evil puppet you can’t control that just talks like that and won’t stop. Because I’m not employed and my wife is over-worked and we’re… Read More ›

• Songs of innocence

  By Bill Pearse on July 6, 2015 • ( 2 )

  

  Originally posted on WHAT THE HELL:
  Over the weekend I read a few articles about the Grateful Dead. I guess they’ve finally called it quits or something. I was never a big Deadhead, and even when I give the old…

• Soft shoulders

  By Bill Pearse on July 6, 2015 • ( 16 )

  I’d had them for a long time, but hadn’t worn them in a long time, the Vietnamese fishermen pants I used for Yoga in the studio at my gym at work, standing on my head with a wife beater, I… Read More ›

• The Safeway in Chewelah, WA

  By Bill Pearse on July 5, 2015 • ( 10 )

  On the drive back I make my kids listen to Townes Van Zandt since it feels like we could be in Texas it’s so hot, everything flat and beaten down by the sun. The songs about places he’d been in… Read More ›

• Right through the indulgent parts

  By Bill Pearse on July 4, 2015 • ( 10 )

  I get behind a guy in the Costco parking lot who’s got a buck with gnarled antlers next to a sticker of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on the name Obama, and next to that, it’s a take-off on… Read More ›

• Full moon over the swale

  By Bill Pearse on July 3, 2015 • ( 6 )

  Brad’s friend Jim reminds me of a scarecrow that’s missing the stuffing around his waist he’s so thin, it makes his pants ride low, that’s the first thing you notice. The kids have gorged themselves on cheese puffs like the… Read More ›

• A new path to the Lantern Tree

  By Bill Pearse on July 2, 2015 • ( 10 )

  

  I’m driving my kids into the deserts of eastern Washington where it’s near wildfire season with no appreciable rain in 30 days, and we stop at a Texaco near the town Vantage, and I think surely that smoke in the… Read More ›

• Stuck inside a hummingbird mobile with the Memphis blues again

  By Bill Pearse on June 29, 2015 • ( 4 )

  We drove around with five fluorescent lamp bulbs in the back of the Volvo and one of the two mufflers missing with the second one scraping the pavement and hanging there wrong like a bad organ, something that needs removed… Read More ›

• The man who caved in on himself

  By Bill Pearse on June 26, 2015 • ( 15 )

  Five years ago we hired our neighbor to renovate our bathroom — redo the shower, tile the bathtub. It took longer than it should when you try to get a good deal and at the end of it, he said… Read More ›